Dec 01, 2008
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.
Nov 30, 2008
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.
Nov 30, 2008
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.
Nov 26, 2008
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.
Nov 24, 2008
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.
Nov 21, 2008
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:
SDL Tridion showed:
Hippo showed:
eZ Systems showed:
e-Spirit showed:
- database integration through the administrative UI
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.
Nov 19, 2008
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.
Nov 19, 2008
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.
Nov 19, 2008
The venerable PCMag is discontinuing its print edition - the most recent in a long string of similar announcements from other publishers. I am seeing a consistent trend in my media and publishing client base. While their overall businesses are struggling, they realize that they cannot afford to stop investing in online publishing. Instead, they are cutting back in their editorial departments and even discontinuing their print editions in order to sustain their online investment (which accounts for an increasing percentage of their revenue as advertising dollars move online).
This has been going on for a long time. Early in 2008, there was an article in the New York times that said that newspapers are reducing their traveling campaign coverage. Paper magazines have steadily been shrinking or disappearing entirely from news stand shelves. Still online investment appears to be steady. In fact, one of my clients recently sent out a letter to creditors excusing delayed payments because of a cash flow problem and they still have the go ahead for a new WCMS deployment.
This is an interesting time to be in digital publishing as companies are investing to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of their digital channels. Some companies are being deliberate and methodical in their digital strategy. Others are aggressively (and desperately) experimenting with lots of ideas hoping one will turn out to be a winner. One thing I am not seeing is digital strategies that look beyond banner advertising sales. Today's strategies are still focused on driving traffic and seeking the best CPMs. I am a little concerned about the future viability of traditional banner advertising as content becomes increasingly consumed on alternative (banner unfriendly) platforms and "banner blindness" spreads to the larger online audience. However, I do think that until that new content business model emerges, the best thing an online publisher can do is continue to invest in creating a great digital product that attracts a loyal audience.
Nov 18, 2008
You have just mentioned that maybe the pain you are feeling in managing your web content may be eased by implementing a web content management system (WCMS) and, all of the sudden, I.T. paratroopers are sliding down ropes with their software selection methodology and other "artifacts." You get suspicious as you recognize the same faces that "helped" you the last time around but are reassured that they have "learned aLOT" from their recent time and expense system procurement.
Spreadsheets are opened and fingers are poised over keys. They cue you with "R00001. The system shall be....?"
"easy to use?" is your diffident response.
"R00001. The system shall be easy to use. OK. R00002. The system shall...?"
Three months later, you have a spreadsheet with a thousand rows of "shalls" that any WCMS vendor (plus most ERP vendors) will say "yes" to. But, worst of all, they mean nothing to you. You are now back to precisely where you started.
What happened here?
Generic requirements gathering processes are self absorbed. They are optimized to comprehensively find business requirements, not understand them within the context of business goals. And the more the requirements are abstracted from the goal of managing content, the less they mean. Quantity and completeness are measurements of success rather than usefulness. What is more, most generic requirements analysis techniques are designed for building custom software rather than selecting software. While custom software development goes from requirements to design, when implementing an existing WCMS, much of the design is already in place. The trick to finding a WCMS is to match your needs with a pre-existing design. Generic requirements are an indirect path to that result.
In a WCMS selection, requirements gathering should stop when you have enough information to filter down the marketplace for a (3 or 4 product) short list. After that, the selection process takes a more experiential aspect where you look at the usability of the software and organizational compatibility with the suppliers that will help assemble the solution (software vendor and systems integrator). To be sure, this part of the process seems overly subjective to some - but, honestly, how objective is an aggregated "user friendliness" score of 3.2?
I like to focus on what I call "Leading Requirements." A leading requirement has at least one of two characteristics: it is important to the organization and/or it is a powerful filter on the marketplace. To be important, a requirement must critically affect daily usage or primary functions of the system. Powerful filter requirements get to the big demarcations of the marketplace - things like baking vs. frying, technology stack, content modeling, content reuse, workflow modeling, licensing strategies, etc. By focusing on leading requirements I can usually get down to 3 or 4 viable solutions that (based on industry gossip) appear to be working well at like companies and are sustainable.
By focusing on leading requirements, I can afford to take the time to document what each one really means. For functional requirements, I write "usage scenarios" that describe users using the solution to complete a business task (like publishing an article). At the bottom of each scenario, I list out the discrete requirements that were identified. These 2-4 paragraph narratives are then useful in the demo process because they become the script for the customized product demonstration.
After the product is selected, requirements are refined to determine what features will be enabled or implemented (and how) in the first release (and subsequent releases) of the system. At this point, you know the platform you are building on so you can explain requirements within the context of the native capabilities of the software. You can also adjust scope to leverage out of the box functionality and even prototype to clarify what you are talking about.
Focusing on leading requirements is not easy. It requires intimate knowledge of the business processes and also the content management industry. Still, there is no faster way to get to a short list of viable products and deeply evaluate them. If you want to learn more about leading requirements, I am teaching a workshop at the Gilbane conference in Boston. Will I see you there?
