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Where content meets technology

Nov 26, 2004

Fatwire offer's CS Express

I just noticed this article on CMS watch. What I find interesting is that when I used to work at divine (then purveyor of Content Server (CS) as well as a very capable lower market solution called Participant Server (PS)) the strategy was to sell CS as an industrial strenth enterprise class CMS, and PS as a solution to departments or small companies where CS was overkill. Then corporate politics started to distort the strategy. The sales organization came largely from Open Market (makers of CS) and the services organization came from ePrise (makers of PS). Sales all but forgot about PS because they didn't know the product and the high license price of CS produced higher commissions. Services didn't like CS as much because they found it harder to use making it difficult to deliver against the overblown expectations and underestimated services costs set by sales.

I wonder if CS has gotten much easier to use in the last couple of years. I remember seeing a press release announcing First Site which contains a bunch of starter templates and reusable components (kudos to FatWire for getting that done, I know that such a project was on the queue at divine for ages). Also, I wonder if FatWire is experiencing organizational issues similar to divine. FatWire had its own CMS which seems to have taken a second seat to CS.