This post was originally written as a comment on Jon Mark’s excellent post Visions of Jon: WCM is for Losers but it got out of hand and I suspect that it is too long for a comment so I am re publishing it here.
Thanks for the great post Jon! I have to agree with you that the term Web Content Management System is misleading because of its diverse focus on multiple publishing channels. You probably remember that in the old days (~1996), the term “CMS” was first used to describe products like Vignette and what are now called ECM systems were just called Document Management Systems, Records Management Systems, etc. When the big DMS vendors started to covet the term “content,” the (then) smaller WCM vendors had to slide over a bit and qualify their category with a “W.” Then some of them started to ruin themselves by trying to expand into document, management, records management, etc. – but that’s another story.
But enough about the Ghosts of Christmas Past… I agree with the point that a WCMS has multiple aspects. I would name three: a management tier to edit semi-structured content, a repository to store the semi-structured content, and a rendering tier to render the content. Usually the repository is more tightly coupled to the management tier so it is often tucked into the management application. In fact, the three components are often bundled for convenience.
In my mind, what sets WCM apart from the other forms of CMS is the C. I still think of Content as having more structure (and less embedded formatting) than what you typically find in an ECM repository. In the ECM world, the structured information is called metadata and is not considered part of the asset (a MS Office file that jumbles together information and presentation). A WCM asset needs to be rendered (given a format) to be useful to a consumer. This is why a WCMS needs a good rendering system.
Most ECM assets can just be downloaded but the range of formats they can take is limited. You can get a different file format (like a PDF) or a different scaling or cropping of an image but the output looks essentially the same. ECM has tricks to add structured information like metadata and embedded tags but that is going against the grain. WCM, which is inherently structured, knows what each of the different elements of an asset mean. I like to say that ECM is documents pretending to be content and WCM is content pretending to be documents. That is, ECM starts with a document and tries to pull information out of it while a WCM starts with structured information and renders it into a .html, .pdf, .xml, or any other kind of document.
So, at the end of it all, I would say that WCM should be renamed back to CM and ECM should be renamed to EDM: Enterprise Document Management.
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I agree with you on this. We are (slowly) moving towards the point where content and other business assets are being stored in non presentation based formats. And at the same time everything is getting URLs. Following URLs comes APIs. Content management then is much more like what we now call WCM, with presentation and code layers (analytics etc), although I think the systems will look rather differrent to the current crop.
CMIS is an attempt by document management systems to get onto this path, at least the stuff becomes addressible even if the content of the documents is still largely inaccessible.
Aaah, yes. The good old days. How about we call them all Story Servers. I’m completely with you on the renaming WCM -> CM. The Web part just doesn’t add anything any more. In fact, if the version I believe is true, Vignette got its name when the CNET dudes decided to look in the dictionary for words that had “Net” in then. The Internet hadn’t become the Interwebs by then.
Not convinced by EDM yet. When I use the term ECM refering to a product, it’s actually a product suite. While I do still think of Document Management products.
Maybe we should all draw lovely pictures to explain how we see the relationships between the terms …
Personally I like to stick with an AIIM centric definition of ECM – which puts the emphasis on strategy. You can have an ECM strategy and have a monolithic suite (like EMC Documentum) or you can have separate WCM, EDM, ERM, DAM etc ‘applications’ managing your various flavors of content.
While I agree with your comments about the differences between ‘documents’ and ‘content assets’ in the context of serving information to web sites (trying to avoid calling it WCM !) I think these two ’sub-categories’ of content management will actually get closer, as XML ‘component content management’ and the desire to “create once and publish to many channels” bridge the gaps between structured and unstructured or document and asset.
So how about we re-organize and talk about ‘capabilities’ of which publishing content to the web (PCW anyone ?) is a particular capability to be provided by content management technologies ??
The thing is, as WCM platforms (like Drupal, of course) get more sophisticated, they actually start to resemble application platforms a’la Jboss. They become ways to build web applications, not just create a site with content that’s rendered in various ways. Yet, because things like Drupal aren’t used for faceless server-side applications, it’s not really an application platform, either.
And thus, the “CM” label is actually under-describing what’s possible; yet Application Platform over-describes it.
We (Acquia) like Social Publishing, but frankly even that starts to pale in comparison to what the platform can do.
Not sure I have a solution here – just comments.
I’m all for CM. It’s what I use today to disambiguate and stay, as much as I’m able, above the fray of nomenclature debates.
[...] layer with common standards (CMIS/JCR), separated from a delivery framework. His post inspired Seth Gottlieb at Content Here, who agrees, wondering if we should go back to calling it CM. You should also check out Peter [...]