CMS Watch Trends and Features

What Wimbledon and vendor selection have in common

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Thu, 2 Jul 2009 15:26:00 -0400

As Murraymania swept the UK, I settled into my Court No. 2 seat on Wimbledon's always-action-packed middle Saturday. In addition to the matches of Serbia's Ivanovic, Australia's Hewitt, and Russia's Safina, I had a great view of the Centre Court scoreboard, so during breaks I was keenly watching the results of Andy Roddick's match.

"Andy's got the first set," I said to my cousin, who's studying in London and joined me for the day. "Andy's not playing yet," interjected the Brit to the other side of me. "Yes he is," I said. Pause. "Oh you mean, your Andy," he replied. "Right," I smiled back, "not your Andy, who plays tonight." Then came the most interesting comment: "Well, he's not really my Andy," the gent said. "I'm English, and he's Scottish."

Territorial rivalries are perhaps more pronounced in sport than any other pastime, be it the Boston Red Sox vs. the New York Yankees, the Calgary Flames vs. the Edmonton Oilers, or the New Zealand All Blacks vs. the Australian Wallabies. Such territorial rivalries aren't altogether absent from the content management vendor selection process, either, and I find this much more pronounced on the eastern side of the Atlantic than in my native North America.

Of course, in Europe and the UK there are many nations and territories (both political and historic) in a comparatively tiny geographic area, which makes a perfect petri dish for such rivalries to fester.

When I work with clients or subscribers to help them select vendors, the two or three finalists often end up being very technologically similar, and once tools have been tested and deemed appropriate for clients' environments, the conversations just prior to final selection often become very much "cultural." It's not just about whether the team is qualified, and if the support line is open when their time zone is open for business. It's also about who they are, and when a few hundred thousand sterling or euros are on the table, the rivalries come out in closed-door conversations.

"They're Belgian -- there's so many jokes about Belgium. Isn't there a reason for that?"
"They're Dutch -- so they're blunt, that's good, right? Aren't the Dutch cheap, too?"
"They're German -- so regimented -- is that right for us? What if the schedule slips, will they charge us double?"
I wouldn't even know where to start on the Scandinavian rivalries, which go back to the days when Sweden and Denmark traded off conquering the whole of Northern Europe.

I end up spending quite a bit of time talking with clients about how they can benefit from vendor characteristics that are different from how their company normally functions. A bit of German organization and Dutch bluntness can be a great thing if your company has neither. I also watch vendors make an extra effort to bring in the "local flavor" to meetings -- someone from the local country or territory, if headquarters is on the other side of the continent. This always makes a big difference to buyers -- more than I believe it should. The English sales guy in the meeting in London isn't going to be the one you'll be working with, or providing you the ongoing service you'll need. Good service is good service, regardless of where it's provided from.

As an American who does a lot of work in Europe and the UK, I also experience trepidation on the part of some buyers. "Oh, you're American," I sometimes hear when I connect with a potential client via phone or meet up in person. Well yes, but CMS Watch is also a UK Limited Company, and one of our Principals is a Brit, and I'm perfectly happy to use the word "whilst" and drink a warm beer with you after work, if it makes you more comfortable. (Note: Americans can be even more blunt that the Dutch.) Expertise may be what matters in the end, but it's far from the only factor when closing a deal.

Stereotyping is dangerous, and as the world becomes smaller, you the technology buyer need to think more about benefiting from that which may seem foreign or "too different" for your organization. Yes, chemistry is important, but suppliers should be adept enough to adapt to your environment, and yet bring new approaches and attitudes to the project to help you be successful. Be it tennis or a vendor competition, the most appropriate mix of factors need to come together to create success, and sometimes those characteristics may not be the ones you're used to, or possessed by your fellow countryman.

As for my final take on Wimbledon: I wish Rafael Nadal wasn't injured. I'd love to see Federer break the majors record, but I'd be just as thrilled to see Roddick pull through. I don't care where Andy Murray is from, I'll cheer for him to play well, along with anyone willing to call himself a Briton.

May the best player win, wherever he's from.

Clickability shows how not to write a white paper

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Wed, 1 Jul 2009 13:05:00 -0400

White papers are not something we typically critique or comment on, but Clickability's new white paper, billed on their website as "What Vignette is Not Telling You," does, in fact, require special comment.

The paper's stated goal "is to provide strategic data and insights that will help in your decision-making process regarding Web Content Management." But the four-page phillipic quickly reveals itself as little more than an arrogant, shrill, and sometimes factually incorrect attack on Vignette and its new parent company, Open Text.

Many of the criticisms made in the white paper (involving upgrade pain, migration pain, slow product innovation, high licensing costs) will be familiar to any student of Vignette-bashing. There's truth in some of the claims, certainly, but it's a dated kind of truth, applying mostly to the Vignette of 2002 or 2004.

The truth is that Vignette has made a good-faith effort, over the past two years, to address many of the well-known criticisms about its products. Along the way, they've managed to produce a significant number of new products and rolled out non-trivial updates to existing ones. They've also become more competitive on pricing, and have clearly gotten the message on upgrade pain. So to drag out the standard laundry list of complaints about the Vignette of Olde and paint the company (yet again) as an innovation-averse, customer-ignoring purveyor of overpriced, outmoded goods is like beating a horse that died two years ago.

Of course, the positive changes that have happened to Vignette and its product line in 2008-2009 are of little comfort to you if you're still running the old V5 or V6. There will be pain involved in moving to a new or different platform. And that's clearly a selling opportunity for vendors like FatWire and Clickability. But those V5/V6 customers are already well aware of their dilemma -- and what does it say about the vendor that pursues that narrow group by painting an entire competing vendor as incompetent?

There are other problems with the white paper. Clickability associates a quote involving "lipstick on a pig" with CMSWire in one part of the paper and then (inaccurately) with CMS Watch in another. In truth, the lipstick statement actually comes from an anonymous comment at the end of an article that appeared on CMSWire.

The name "CMS Watch" occurs four times in the white paper. Lest there be any misunderstanding, CMS Watch was not consulted prior to the paper's release. Our approval was neither sought nor given.

That goes also for the use of my name in the white paper. I did say, in a blog post about Open Text's acquisition of Vignette, that "Open Text's mishmash of .NET, C++, and Java technologies is not particularly well aligned with Vignette's J2EE-based systems" and that "Vignette only adds another layer to -- it in no way reconciles -- Open Text's crazy quilt of technologies." The Clickability paper repurposes these quotes out of context, hoping to turn technical analysis into scathing indictment. That wasn't my intent.

Even if a person at an ad agency (rather than inside Clickability) wrote this so-called white paper, someone at Clickability should know enough about Marketing 101 to understand that you can't mud-sling your way to success. Good marketing isn't about making the competition look bad. It's about raising yourself up. In this case, if Clickability somehow finds itself raised up by this, it will be because it has been hoisted by its own petard.

The Omniture Drag - and your quest for aligning web content and analytics

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 1 Jul 2009 11:41:00 -0400

In recent months I've encountered several customers of web analytics mega-vendor Omniture who had a very specific gripe about the platform: it was too hard to integrate Omniture reports and analytics into other applications, specifically their Web CMS dashboards. (Note: I'm not talking here about integrating vendor's JavaScript tracking code into your CMS -- that's usually trivial -- but rather, exposing reports in a CMS dashboard.)

At least three Web CMS vendors have also privately complained to us about Omniture in this regard. I think it's revealing that CMS vendors announce plans to implement Omniture reports in-line, but they never seem to come off.

To be fair, report integration can get difficult other analytics vendor offerings as well. My colleague Phil Kemelor points out that WebTrends and other commercial web analytics vendors can also be rigid in this regard. He's right, although I've seen WebTrends report or data integrations across various CMS packages, but have never seen anything similar with Omniture reports.

As our Web Analytics research subscribers know, Omniture has a reputation for being particularly closed when it comes to exporting data or reports. It wants to become your web data warehouse and central analytics hub. Case in point: you have to go to great lengths even to remove Omniture's logo from their reports when e-mailing them around internally.

I believe this mountain-comes-to-mohammed approach represents a hidden drag on Omniture licensees.

Why does this matter? I think content managers want to access analytics in a place where they can take action. Omniture would have you log into their dashboard, but many casual web managers find that too complicated, too remote, and not actionable. Web managers then tend to turn to (the probably over-worked) in-house Omniture guru. That seems wasteful. In these economic times, analytics are too important to be left only to analysts.

(One increasingly evident alternative -- resorting to the lightweight traffic metrics possibly built into your CMS -- doesn't solve the problem either. These CMS-driven systems typically deliver sub-standard metrics that even their vendors won't fully stand behind.)

Integration aside, the larger point is that web managers need to get savvier about analytics, rather than depending on others. Questions abound. What are the key technical issues? What data can you trust more than others? How do you effectively measure campaigns? And so on. (Disclosure: we answer many of these questions in our Web Analytics Fundamentals certificate course.) However you get there, if you're a web manager or web content specialist, learn more about analytics. Then push your vendor to deliver the right reports to the publishing tools you already use every day -- so you can act on them.

What do you think?

Will NYC go with Google Analytics?

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Wed, 1 Jul 2009 00:36:00 -0400

Just read an interesting post on Tom Miller's blog summarizing NYC Mayor Bloomberg's keynote note from the Personal Democracy Forum. Miller's take on the speech was that the city may use Google Analytics for optimizing web site content. From this passage about the Bloomberg presentation, I'd have to agree:

The Mayor also announced that the city is going to partner with Google to study "anonymous usage data" to "allow us to optimize the content on the web site based on what people are most often searching for."

I have to say, the idea of government web sites using Google Analytics makes me a bit uneasy from a privacy perspective. I just can't get comfortable with the idea of the government passing data to GA so Google can come up with new ways to advertise and market.

There's a lot of activity going on these days around the subject of web analytics and government as it relates to the Obama Administration Open Government initiative and the release of the Web Analytics Association Report on Government and Web Analytics.

We don't usually think of the public sector as a hotbed of web analytics activity, but change has been long overdue. It's great to see that change may be on the way. Hopefully it will be sorted out so that there is a reasonable balance between analytics value and personal privacy protection.

A browser is a search engine?

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:36:00 -0400

In a clip on YouTube, an interviewer asks passersby in Times Square what a browser is.The surprising result: many think it's a search engine.

Of course, the video has been produced by the Google Creative Lab so you could expect it to promote search engines. However, students in Rotterdam repeated the question -- and got people answering mostly the same things.

I tend to think a search engine is one of those somewhat hidden components, like the starter engine of a car. Everybody will "search" all the time, but not too many people know there's such a thing as a "search engine" behind it. Explaining the technicalities of what it takes to run it won't particularly help, either, though nobody is happy when it doesn't work well.

So if the experiment proves anything it's that the men and women in the street really don't know what's going on behind the scenes. Paradoxically, that's a sign of progress: they don't have to know in order to be able to use it, much the same way as you don't have to be a mechanic to drive a car anymore.

So before you head off on a big search, portal, collaboration, or content management project, invest the time to find out what's what and whether it's actually what's needed. After all, you may have been asked for a search engine -- when what's really needed is just a browser. And likewise, you may have been tasked with setting up SharePoint -- when what you really need is just the search engine.

Lucene can read almost anything: Lucid and ISYS team up

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:19:00 -0400

A few months ago, I blogged about ISYS offering their document converter filters as a separate component. My thought was these would come in handy to add on to Lucene (which, by itself, can't actually read Microsoft Office files, let alone more exotic document types.) That would still leave you with a bit of DIY work, though: integrating the filters in your Lucene implementation.

As it turns out, Lucid Imagination had exactly that idea. The company, which offers commercial support for Lucene and Solr, is now offering it's own "LucidWorks" versions with the ISYS filters integrated. This means one of the gaps between open source and commercial search products has been bridged: with the filters, Lucene, too, can read over 200 file types.

According to Lucid, this has been one of the favorite doubts commercial vendors would cast over the open source search engine, and the move should level the playing field. However, as a customer, you should be aware that there's a couple of other things you may take for granted that are missing. Connectors to various content repositories, for instance, don't come with Lucene, not even a simple web crawler.

Still, the filters are a welcome addition, and they're certainly an improvement over what's currently available as open source. It's not just in the numbers: ask yourself how you think a converter will read a three-column Word document. You may be surprised to know that some will just go across all the first lines from left to right, then the second lines, etcetera. As always in Search & Information Access, the devil is in the details -- and knowing about these details will pay off.

The added filters aren't for free, but not exactly expensive, either. There's a 14-day trial, and you can get a subset (e.g., Microsoft Office) of the filters for as little as $3.250 for 2 years, or pay $10.000 for all of them (including those pesky legacy formats you'll discover in a distant corner of your fileserver when you least expect it.) That's still a long way off from the hundreds of thousands even a Google Appliance implementation may cost you in licensing. (Though there's no such thing as a free lunch or free beer with open source, either.)

So this is interesting news if you're considering Lucene, but what about ISYS? Aren't they selling the family silver? Well, let me wrap up this post by meandering off into history. As the (perhaps apocryphal) story has it, when the Dutch were at war with the Spanish in the 16th century, they were still selling cannons to their opponents. They figured they might as well make a profit out of it: the outcome would be determined by strategy, anyway.

Open source projects and commercial vendors, on the other hand, don't even have to be at war. And as with a Spanish Rioja or a Dutch Heineken, it's all about picking the right one for the occasion.

Really Strategies acquires DocZone

rockley@rockley.com(Ann Rockley) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:12:00 -0400

It's proving to be a busy week! Today Really Strategies announced the acquisition of DocZone.com. As subscribers to our XML and Component Content Management research know, Really Strategies' RSuite is an XML-based content management system aimed at publishing and media companies. DocZone.com is best known for its SaaS-based DITA solution for technical publishing.

It will be interesting to see how these companies blend. Really Strategies, while having some experience with DITA, has largely focused on traditional publishing, while DocZone.com has almost exclusively focused on DITA-based technical publishing. Over the last year we have seen each of them "inch" into the other's market as DITA is being adopted outside of technical publishing and publishing, and media companies have begun to look for low cost XML solutions (e.g. SaaS).

Publishing and media companies are under a lot of pressure to "innovate or die" as traditional print-based journalism has begun to rapidly disappear. Really Strategies offers a relatively high-end solution for publishing and media and a client/server-only version. DocZone.com provides a low cost SaaS version. Together they can potentially serve a broader range of customers.

DocZone.com is in a unique position in that its product is portable to any underlying XML technology. The value of portability was shown when their original platform XHive Docato (now known as XDB) was bought by EMC. They maintained that platform and rapidly built another version on top of open-source Alfresco. At the same time, they simplified the interface and consolidated their intellectual capital in the user experience. That type of innovation should stand them in good stead as they blend the technologies.

In addition Really Strategies will gain from DocZone.com's European presence and strong global focus.

Really Strategies has pledged to maintain DocZone.com's product and customer base. The combined companies will be headquartered in Audubon, PA. So.... (for the second day in a row), "tread with caution" if you are considering buying either DocZone or Really Strategies, as it could be quite some time before things truly settle down.

XYEnterprise Acquired - First Thoughts

rockley@rockley.com(Ann Rockley) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:21:00 -0400

UK-based SDL remains in a spending mood. The trend began with acquiring longtime Web CMS vendor Tridion, followed by Trisoft in early 2008.

Now SDL has acquired Component Content Management (CCM) vendor XyEnterprise. Time will tell how this acquisition plays out, but it does illustrate how the CCM marketplace could be consolidating into larger players

At first glance it appears to be an odd acquisition, since, as our CCM research subscribers know, XyEnterprise Contenta and SDL Trisoft compete head to head in the marketplace. On closer look however, there is some logic in the acquisition. SDL Trisoft provides pretty strong DITA capabilities and reuse in a multilingual environment. Though not a large vendor, XyEnterprise brings a range of products:

Contenta, a DITA and S1000D CCM
XML Professional Publisher (XPP), an XML-rendering engine
LiveContent, a dynamic delivery engine

SDL says that XPP and LiveContent will be integrated almost immediately. SDL has also indicated that Contenta's S1000D version will continue to exist as a separate product and the strengths of the DITA version (e.g., workflow, authoring bridges) will get integrated into SDL Trisoft. That will not be an easy task, and we anticipate it will take years to complete.

So there are some additions with XPP and LiveContent, and some gap filling (e.g., S1000D), but SDL has a long way to go to make this a truly integrated product. And while XPP is a good rendering engine with a long track record relative to its nearest competitors, it has also grown a little long in the tooth now, and has not kept up to date with all of the newer standards (like XSL-FO).

As in all acquisitions there will inevitably be fall-out and change, and just how well a small New England-based firm like XYEnterprise will operate as a part of a European roll-up remains an open question. How nicely they will play with the Trisoft team is also something to watch closely. So.... (you could see this line coming), tread with caution if you are considering buying either Trisoft or Contenta, as it will be quite some time before things truly settle down.

Will the success of SharePoint 2007 keep 2010 from leaving the station?

shawn_shell@consejoinc.com(Shawn Shell) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:44:00 -0400

Those who have studied physics might be familiar with the "story" of the penny and train. The story goes that if you place a single penny under each wheel of a train, you'll prevent it from moving forward. Essentially, the collective resistance from each penny prevents the train moving forward because it's the same as having the train try to overcome a single column of pennies equivalent to all of the pennies stacked.

As SharePoint 2010 draws near, I can't help but think that perhaps the sheer number of both licensees and add-on solutions, collectively represent a penny under each wheel of the SharePoint train. 100+ million licenses and thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) clearly represent a SharePoint strength. In fact, the platform has become so popular that a few colleagues of mine suggested awhile back that perhaps SharePoint had effectively ended the great debate about what portal platform to buy.

If you were to poll most organizations, they would prefer to implement newer technology over older if given the choice. However, this is only true when they have little or nothing invested in the older technology. If you ask organizations the same question, after they've invested a great deal in the older technology, they might have the desire to implement the newer technology, but not the stomach; it's just too painful to think of all the work that would have to be "redone."

Now back to our proverbial train: will the 100 million SharePoint licensees and thousands of SharePoint add-on vendors prevent SharePoint 2010 from getting out of the station? Or will 2010 represent the next round of massive SharePoint adoption? As the SharePoint Report 2009 points out, there are quite a few vendors out there who support SharePoint and 2010 could be a terrific boon to organizations hoping to see more from SharePoint. However, if you've read the Enterprise Portals Report you also know that SharePoint isn't the only game in town (in case you needed reminding).

If organizations are going to spend significant time and money upgrading to 2010, why wouldn't they also consider alternatives?

The Coming Acronym Crisis

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:14:00 -0400

As I talk to people in the content-technology industry (if I may call it that), I'm struck by a common thread that has begun to emerge in conversations involving roadmaps and futures. Vendors are beginning to unshackle themselves from acronyms. Let me spare you the suspense and take you straight to the disturbing punchline: I believe we are headed for an acronym crisis.

I've heard Digital Asset Management vendors say that DAM is not a good acronym any more, because it conjures a narrow, obsolete picture of the problem space. DAM platforms have grown. Offerings like MediaBeacon R3volution, MediaBin (now owned by Autonomy), North Plains Telescope, and others, are beginning to include functionalities that are, in many cases, rather ECM-like. Likewise, many WCM products -- Alterian Immediacy, PaperThin CommonSpot, and many others -- continue to incorporate more and more DAM-like features (e.g., lightbox previews, inline image editing, renditions, image metadata support, Flash previews). Some products, like Day Software's Communiqué, have such smooth integration between WCM and DAM offerings that it's hard to tell where one begins and the other one ends.

But it's not just a matter of WCM+DAM convergence (something that's been talked about, and has been happening, for a long time now). Search and Web Analytics are increasingly integral to Content Management solutions, and these technologies are, in turn, driving more personalization and dynamism into Web-facing systems. The information that comes out of all this has high business value and needs to be fed back into any number of other business applications (CRM, BI, KM, Sales Lead Management systems, etc.), lest ROI suffer. But the crisscrossing of so many technologies leads to a paradox: What do you call a system that combines features of WCM, DAM, Web Analytics, Search and Information Access, and maybe CRM as well? No one acronym seems to do the job.

All of this begs the question of whether acronyms are really that important to begin with. I think they are, actually. (Otherwise we wouldn't have so many of them -- and they wouldn't persist for so long after becoming obsolete.) As old acronyms fall into disuse, new ones emerge. CMS gives way to WCM which gives way to WEM (Web Experience Management), which in turn will someday give way to something else. Right now, though, the industry is at a crossroads. What do you call a CMS that incorporates aspects of DAM, WCM, DM, Search, Web Analytics, and Text Mining, plus (say) a few social apps? You can call it a content platform (CP), but that feels vaguely unsatisfying.

Nomenclature is important, I think. But in this case, I'm fresh out of acronyms. And for an analyst, that's embarrassing.

2009 Enterprise Portals Market Overview

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:13:00 -0400

We are not market researchers, but we do think it is important for every buyer to grasp a basic understanding of underlying market dynamics.

For those of you intrigued or interested at what is happening in the world of Enterprise Portals, here is a SlideShare recording that looks at our updated Cross-Check Analysis of the vendors as of June 2009.

Much more detailed analysis on the marketplace and head-to-head evaluations of enterprise portals vendors and products can be found in The Enterprise Portals Report 2009.

New Social Software and Collaboration research

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:06:00 -0400

We released the latest edition of our Social Software & Collaboration research at the Enterprise 2.0 conference today, and as you might expect, the marketplace is evolving rapidly.

But this time, an interesting twist: after a year of almost chaotic feature expansion, most -- though not all -- enterprise social software vendors are focusing more on specific use-cases and and demonstrating business value. You can read our longer release here.

I say "not all" because some pure-play wiki vendors are trying to move beyond point solutions to become broader social platforms. We're not optimistic about the prospects of that shift.

One thing we'd still like to see on your behalf: real services for enterprisewide management, particularly multi-instance management for enterprise roll-outs. Social tools from even the largest vendors are still predominantly departmental solutions when you look closely under the covers.

Go here to download a free sample of this research. As always, subscribers will receive their updates automatically.

Some lessons out of ECM vendor demo hell

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:37:00 -0400

Self immolation is a rare, some may say mythical event. Yet in the world of content management it is more common than you might think. For example, I witnessed three major ECM Suite vendors burst into flames of their own earlier this year during a week of day-long demos for a large customer.

Many lessons came out of the week, both for vendors trying to sell high-end systems in a tough market, and for buyers ensuring they don't commit to the wrong technology or supplier. And in ECM you do commit: for a very long time and a hell of a lot of money. You almost never have the option to turn back or change your mind.

To give a bit of background to this story, while protecting client confidentiality and the innocent (if there were any innocent parties), let me give you the following details. The client is a large and very well established "blue chip" publisher. Let's call them Acme Inc. The budget for the project will come in around $2+ million for software alone, as Acme deals with hundreds of millions of documents, with maybe 300,000 chugging through complex workflows at any one time. In short it's a typical large (though not huge) ECM situation.

Due to complex legacy application dependencies and various in-house technical complexities, Acme shortlisted Alfresco, Oracle, IBM, Objective, and EMC Documentum. Together we reviewed a couple of other systems, but due to various support issues were unable to shortlist them. Of course these five players often compete against each other in larger deals, so frankly the shortlist was no real surprise. In the end, three of the five elected to bid and demo. I'll call them Vendors A, B, and C.

Acme wrote an excellent RFP: concise, focused on scenarios. In fact one vendor went as far to say that "This was the best RFP we have ever seen...life would be a lot easier if they were all like this." And indeed they are right; hundreds of pages of check-lists deliver no value to anyone. Acme went further than most by providing a detailed guide to how they wanted the onsite demos to run. This included a precise agenda, and very detailed demo cases (no PPTs). Acme could not have done more to help the vendors.

Yet the three days of demos were close to disaster.

Vendor A arrived and got off to a storming start, with an excellent intro that showed deep understanding of Acme's needs. The senior account rep then turned to the specialists to run the demos. And for the next three hours a group of 30 Acme managers watched a platform die slowly on stage. The senior account rep may have understood Acmes needs, but the ECM specialist was clearly out of the loop. When the BPM specialist took over it only got worse. Instead of showing Acme how to build and manage business processes, he tried to construct a Web Service. Nobody figured out why. Perhaps that's what he knew best. Things got worse when the demo moved to the part where Vendor A had to build a simple GUI. Their GUI-building scenario revealed byzantine processes dominated by a proprietary scripting language, and the end result was a blank screen reading "Remote Server does not Respond."

Could things get any worse? Yes they could. At a wrap-up session with a smaller group of decision makers, a short critique of the day was provided, but Acme threw a bone to them. "Clearly things didn't go well and the ball is in your court now..." The most senior Vendor A rep proceeded to throw a hissy fit, became exceptionally rude to the Acme team, and then stomped off early, leaving junior salespeople to try to pick up the pieces.

So, this vendor displayed exceptional arrogance, was rude and demeaning, delivered a horrible demonstration, wasted the time of 30+ managers, and qualified themselves out of the process in spectacular fashion. Ironically Vendor A probably had the best technology fit among all the competitors on the short list, but nobody at Acme ever wants them to darken their door again. This particular vendor has a reputation for arrogance and bullying. That is a tactic that may have sufficed in the past, but does not work in a buyer-empowered market. A bit of humility and co-ordination would have gone a long way, but clearly Vendor A didn't think they needed to bother.

Lesson #1: Major vendors are simply not used to the buyer being in the driving seat. They are still used to taking a few senior people out for golf, and then coming along with a canned whiz presentation. But that is as much the buyers' fault, as you have acquiesced to that preposterous situation for too long.

Lesson #2: If the vendor with the best technology can't grasp your needs in a full-day pitch demo, they are unlikely to make a good match over a multi-year relationship. Although you can over-emphasize "chemistry" in the sales phase -- after all, copasetic salespeople will go away when the real work starts -- the vendor's preparation is an important indicator of how good a match they think your project makes.

Then came Vendor B. They did fine at first, demonstrating their capabilities by following the scenarios faithfully. But a day is a long time -- enough time for the audience at Acme to start to see the serious complexity of the product emerge. Again proprietary scripting languages emerged at inopportune moments, and the bewildering complexity of the BPM modeling environment left many in the audience fearful of what might happen if this thing was let loose within the organization. That said, the product worked, and Acme got to see it warts and all -- a good thing for both parties.

Where things really went wrong was during the business discussion. Vendor B was at a loss to explain the rationale for seven line items in their bid, totalling an additional $150K. Then they admitted (or rather we pointed out to them) that they demonstrated various essential modules without including them in their financial proposal. The defense from the vendor was, "It's difficult for us since we have nearly 150 items in our price list." Uh-oh. The buyer was left wondering if the complexity in the company's pricing was deliberate. For while other vendors bundled all the essential functional requirements into a single priced package, Vendor B offered up nearly 30 line items. And yet in the end, the quote contained items Acme didn't need, while missing key modules that were crucial to fulfilling the demos. Acme could actually cope with this product's technical complexity (though many could not), but the pricing discussion left Acme wary and distrustful.

Lesson #3: Always make sure to align technical and price proposals, and continue to do so all the way through the selection process. Vendor product lines are complex, their own salespeople frequently don't understand them, and, unfortunately, sandbagging is rife in our industry.

Now Vendor C. All they had to do was get to the end of the day in one piece and they could proceed to the next phase. Like the others, they off to a decent start. The first couple of hours (with the exception of an excruciating sales pitch intro) went very well. Acme selection team members were looking around the room with eyebrows raised, seeming to say, "Now this is more like it!" Vendor C followed the scenario scripts closely, eased by advance preparation in developing an impressive mock application. Unfortunately, this application seemed to be riddled with bugs and simply ceased to work after an hour or so into the demo. From there, things went from bad to worse, and Acme never got to see everything they needed to review.

Lesson #4: There's a reason you build demo use-cases and make vendors stick to them. It allows you to actually test the solution, and enables you to compare complex platforms in an apples-to-apples way.

For Acme, all the pain was not in vain. The demos were difficult to watch at times, but Acme really got to learn about the vendors and products -- the good, the bad, and yes the ugly. They saw three teams work under immense pressure. In one case it was easy to say "Your fired!" Yet out of the other demo debacles Acme probably found an acceptable supplier.

Perhaps more importantly a very clear picture emerged of the work that lies ahead. Acme is in a much stronger position than before. They have a deeper understanding of three very different technologies and three very different vendors -- offerings that according to the Magic Quadrant all sit side-by-side. Acme also has a much more profound understanding of their own requirements and capabilities.

The selection process isn't over. Acme will continue to test carefully before they spend their money, but I have high hopes for a successful project. Yet without the blood and bruises of the demo week, the chances of success would have been far lower.

Contribute to key debates in Enterprise Social Software

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:57:00 -0400

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, MA next week I'll be facilitating a discussion on "Social Software: Key Debates" -- essentially, what are the major outstanding arguments in enterprise social computing.

Would you like to suggest debate topics? Already circling in my head:

Is "Enterprise 2.0" more meaningful than "Social Software"?
Blogging is passé -- vive micro-blogging?
Can social computing consistently bring real ROI?
Should community managers have to worry about information lifecycle management?
Are social content ratings really helpful ?
Tools: suite or best of breed?
Should your website/intranet have a community or be a community?
Do you really need an enterprise micro-blogging tool when we have Twitter?

Any feedback on these? Some better than others? What to drop and add? Reply below, or you can continue this discussion on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Many thanks. Hope to see you there...

Vignette bets big on beta-SaaS

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:36:00 -0400

So many things have gotten the "aaS" (as-a-service) suffix in the past year that it's hard to imagine anything new or noteworthy being added to the list at this point. But I'm starting to think that a new flavor of "aaS" (yes, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this...) may well be in the works. I'll spare you the mental anguish of a new acronym. We can just call it what it is: hosted beta testing, or beta-software-as-a-service.

Hosted beta testing may not be new. But it's far from the norm. It's an underutilized (to say the least) alternative to the usual "Go fly our kite in a storm and report back to us" type of beta testing. I think it could catch on bigtime, though, for many of the same reasons SaaS has gotten so much traction lately.

Content management vendor Vignette, it turns out, is placing a major bet on "beta-SaaS." The company says that ahead of the next major release of their flagship Vignette Content Management offering, beta customers will be able to take advantage of something called the Vignette Virtual Environment (VVE) Program (known in Austin as "the sandbox"). The company says that VVE will provides beta testers with virtualized instances of V-next running on a full technology stack, with a great deal of infrastructure already configured, so that testers can hit the ground running.

According to the company, "Beta customers will be able to take control of the environment as though it is an on-premise deployment," meaning (among other things) that customers can write to the APIs, deploy custom components, and try various kinds of customizations and reconfigurations as part of the beta-test experience. It is, in fact, just what it sounds like: SaaS beta.

Of course, it's not going to be a panacea for every customer and every use-case. If you're running a highly customized install on an enterprise stack that's not replicated in one of VVE's VMWare images, or if you've done a lot of integration work involving, say, some of your company's various "remote systems," you won't be able to test everything the way you want it in the Vignette Virtual Environment. You're a candidate for orthodox you-host-it beta testing, in that case.

Nevertheless, you can expect to test a surprising number of use-cases -- including important things like user acceptance of new UI features -- in VVE fairly quickly, and uncover serious data- and app-migration problems early on, without having first spent a ton of time and effort setting up an in-house sandbox of your own.

Vignette is quick to admit that for some types of testing, a customer-controlled on-site environment is essential. But for getting a handle on major new functionalities -- and for finding out quickly whether your content contributors, admins, power users, and developers are going to run into any showstoppers -- the VVE approach will likely prove useful.

Meanwhile, it's a potential cost- and time-saver for customers. There are, after all, significant hardware and software implementation costs involved in standing up even a relatively modest beta test environment. With a hosted beta, the vendor eats the setup and operational costs. The customer comes in with guns blazing. Everyone gets where they need to go a little bit faster.

The vendor, meanwhile, gets something very valuable out of all this: namely, better-quality test results. The environment can be monitored; if something goes awry, it can be investigated "on-site" immediately. The vendor doesn't have to try to replicate the customer's environment. It removes a lot of guesswork. One of the typical problems with beta-test programs is that once the software leaves the vendor's physical control, the vendor never really knows how it's being used. Which parts of the product might the customer be over-testing? Under-testing? Which peculiarities of the customer's infrastructure might be introducing anomalies? Manifold ambiguities accompany customer-site beta testing. Anything that reduces that ambiguity makes the process more valuable.

It will be interesting to see how the Vignette Virtual Environment (VVE) Program fares when it's "put to the test" later this year -- assuming Open Text doesn't have other ideas, of course. (The VVE project is already funded and work has begun on it, but the Vignette acquisition hasn't yet closed, and it's always possible Open Text could nix the program.)

If the program goes forward as planned, and it results in a higher quality product in a shorter period of time, it'll be a big win for the concept of beta-SaaS, and a welcome development for Vignette customers, as well (something a lot of Vignette customers could use right about now).

Are Times Changing for US Government Web Analytics?

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:07:00 -0400

It may be that we are on the verge of significant changes to the US Federal government policy on the use of persistent cookies.

The White House blog is inviting comment on how a new cookie policy should be shaped: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Enhancing-Online-Citizen-Participation-Through-Policy/

I've posted my comments on the site and have reprinted them on:http://wam.typepad.com/wam/2009/06/us-federal-government-cookie-policy-under-review.html

My recommendations for a new policy are fairly straightforward:

Allow the use of first party, persistent cookies for Web site measurement.
Prominently disclose how Web site measurement is used and how the data is collected and analyzed.
Provide instructions for how users may delete persistent cookies from their browser settings.
Combination of PII and unique visitor ID (persistent cookie ID) will not be used for analysis.

What do you think? Is this enough? Not enough? I'm all for privacy protection as those of you who've read the commentary I wrote with Tony: www.cmswatch.com/Feature/191-Data-Ownership

However, I would advocate a balance between privacy and analysis, so that Federal web managers can provide more effective sites.

What's your take?