Change.gov, President-Elect Obama's transition website is licensing all of it's content under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. I think that is pretty cool but I was wondering who owns that content anyway.
Yesterday I presented a 4 hour workshop on selecting a CMS at the Gilbane Conference. I was pleased with the attendance and the audience's level of engagement. People were asking questions and making comments right to the end. Here are the slides.
I wish I could have stayed at the conference longer. So many colleagues/friends were in town and I could only see a couple of them before I had to shoot off to a client.
In a throwback to 2003, the Interwoven blog has a post spreading some good old fashioned FUD about open source software. The general message is that, while the software is free, open source will wind up costing you more money in the long run because it lacks the functionality of commercial software (presumably like TeamSite). Like most blanket statements about whole categories of software, the accuracy is dubious. However, like most myths it is built on a grain of truth. Here is how...
In the choice of build vs. buy, it is nearly always cheaper to buy - or share (in the case of open source software). The trick is finding the software that most closely matches your requirements to minimize the amount of customization that you need to write. If the best fit is TeamSite (and sometimes it is), buy TeamSite. It will be cheaper to buy TeamSite than to take another product and make it just like TeamSite. Nevertheless, be forewarned; even if TeamSite is a slam-dunk for your needs, the license is not the only thing you will be paying for. Like any web content management system, expect to spend a considerable amount of money on customization (unless you are totally satisfied with having your site look exactly like the mutual fund demo that the sales engineer prepared for you and 100 other prospects). Having done TeamSite implementations, I can assure you that TeamSite is not cheaper than average to implement. I guess you could say that all CMS are like puppies: some are free, some cost lots of money, but they are all expensive to take care of.
Depending on your requirements, the best fit may be a platform that just happens to be open source software. To give a concrete example, just look at the Interwoven Blog site . You would be crazy to buy TeamSite (at over $100,000 in licensing) to manage a site like this. That is, unless you were Interwoven, in which case it would be very embarrassing not too. In addition to the high licensing cost, the amount of configuration to turn TeamSite into a simple blogging tool would be many multiples of what it would take to set up and theme a pure blogging tool like WordPress or Moveable Type.
I think what is most interesting about this post is why Interwoven felt the need to write it. Are they feeling threatened by open source software in general or a specific open source application? I would much rather them spend the effort in improving their own product than spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about others.
One of the barriers to select TYPO3 in North America has been the dearth of developers and systems integrators that know the platform. This is in stark contrast to Germany where many consultancies and agencies are quite prolific with TYPO3. In fact, TYPO3 has even has its own German print magazine T3N.
So you could imagine my surprise when I found that there will be a T3Con in Dallas (as in Texas) this Spring. Details are still sparse and the lone organizer appears to be the German TYPO3 specialist punkt (whose website is in German only). If you know anything more about this event, please let me know. I am intrigued.
Four years ago today I started Enter Content Here with a post defining content management. The post focused on what was being managed and how to differentiate that from other types of data. Over the past years this blog has reported and explored lots of ideas but content (or, as Bob Boiko would say "Information") has always remained in the center of it all. I am still interested what distinguishes content from other data but I think the focus needs to shift to the "management" end of the phrase "content management."
I like the saying "content management is a verb not a product" because it emphasizes the effort and process required to effectively create and use information. However, there are better verbs to describe this effort than "management" - a vague word that often connotes what we do with undesirable things like risk, waste, and stress. Content is an asset, not a liability (unless you are getting sued and you need to pay lawyers to read it), and working with it should be described in more positive and active language: communicating, creating, educating, publishing, collaborating, connecting, etc.
There is still much more to write about the processes and technologies that people use to release value from information. It has been four years and I feel like I am just getting started.
In case you missed it, OStatic's Sam Dean has an excellent interview with Angela Byron about Drupal. Angela works for Lullabot and is an important contributor in the Drupal community. She contributed to the upcoming O'Reilly book Using Drupal
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Best quote:
The Drupal project has an unconventional philosophy on backwards compatibility. During each major version of Drupal, developers are highly encouraged to think up crazy new things that Drupal can do, without fear of breaking legacy APIs. While users' data will always be preserved throughout the ages, if we come up with new standards we want to support, or a much better and more performant way of doing something, developers are given free reign to go off in that direction.
Gerry McGovern has a brilliant article on CMSWire that compares the common habit of migrating bad content into a new CMS to pouring sour milk into a different bottle. To quote:
Another team is assembled to take the old jug and migrate its contents into the new portal jug. Once all the putrefied milk has been drained into the new portal jug there’s high-fives and lattes all-round. Job well done, Joe! Project complete.
One of the first things that I talk to my clients about during a CMS selection is whether or not they need a new CMS in the first place. This year, I have talked three clients out of buying a new CMS. Sometimes it is just a matter of organizational neglect and bad content - and neither has anything to do with technology. Other times the CMS is difficult to use because the client made it that way by implementing onerous workflows and a bad content model. A simple upgrade and re-customization would fix those problems.
Another metaphor that I find effective is getting a new car when the ashtray is full but then emptying the contents of the old ashtray into the new car. But that doesn't have the visceral impact of rotting milk.
I am finally going over my jboye08 notes and I found my scribbles from the Web Idol competition. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this event, each vendor gets seven minutes to demonstrate their product. "Celebrity" judges put in their quips (á la American Idol) and the audience votes on what product they like the most. In addition to being entertaining, the event gives insight into what the vendors think are their coolest features (they can't show everything in 7 minutes) and what the audience responds to. Here is what the vendors demonstrated this year (in order of their appearance).
Sitecore showed:
incontext editing
their "site builder" functionality
multi-device preview
their ribbon tool bars
building a slide show
SDL Tridion showed:
incontext editing
integrating translation into workflow
emailing groups
a Forester chart
Hippo showed:
dashboard plugins
drag and drop WYSIWYG control (e.g. dragging a URL onto a piece of text to create a link)
associating content
eZ Systems showed:
contributing content from MS Word
browse to edit
creating a picture gallery
community rating
e-Spirit showed:
This year Sitecore won first place and Hippo came in second. Interestingly, reigning champion eZ Systems did not show all the video functionality which helped them win last year. The audience seemed to be the most attracted to clean user interfaces that looked simple to use. Advanced functionality like sophisticated workflow and database integration were less compelling. While an event like Web Idol does not translate into a software selection, I think this result reenforces the importance of simplicity and ease of use in a demo. Power, range, and flexibility gets a product onto a short list but simplicity is what business users find sexy (at least as far as software demos go). If you are running a CMS selection, this means that you need to make sure that all of the products that demo to your selection team meet your core functional and non-functional requirements.
I should mention that being listed top center in Alltop Content Management isn't too bad on the ego either. Thanks to whomever put Enter Content Here there.
Fierce Content Management just named Enter Content Here in its top 10 list of content management websites. The rest of the list is:
Here is how Enter Content Here was described:
This site offers a more technical perspective on content management than you get from the other sites on this list. Author Seth Gottlieb is an industry consultant who helps clients implement enterprise content management solutions. In addition to the free blog, he sells in-depth reports analyzing different content management packages.
Being mentioned in this group is a true honor and I am grateful for the consideration.
