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Contented Management

My CMS vendor just got acquired; should I panic?

It’s all the rage for the CMS community; OpenText is acquiring Vignette.

What does this mean for clients of the two companies?

RedDot has been the web content management offering from OpenText for the last few years. It’s a pretty basic tool compared to Vignette, but this has distinct advantages: friendly user interface, quicker to implement, generally cheaper to develop basic functionality. I expect that RedDot will continue to be sold, but that there will be minimal product development. It will probably serve as a cheaper basic WCM in the same way as Alterian market Immediacy as a cheaper alternative to Morello.

The big challenge for the new company will be how to consolidate and exploit LiveLink and Vignette’s core content management offering, VCM. The offering that OpenText should be providing is end-to-end content management from documents and business process to web, but it’s going to be a substantial task to provide this through two pieces of software that are so established. LiveLink does the trick with documents and VCM does it with complex web content. But this certainly doesn’t mean that the two fit together neatly.

A significant benefit for OpenText is the acquisition of Vignette portal (VAP). This will enable OpenText to market web applications rather than just content-driven websites. Again, there will probably have to be some significant work done on the API level to LiveLink to turn this into a fully SOA-enabled platform. Nevertheless, if you’re doing business via the web — and surely everyone is these days — then a portal offering is a necessity for any enterprise content management vendor.

OpenText will be able to offer a product suite to match any of its competitors. But it will be a suite, not an integrated platform. Indeed the company has a poor track record in integrating its product suite: Gauss and ObTree anyone? Even RedDot stands pretty much alone from LiveLink. Oracle, despite its many acquisitions, has a far smoother integration of document and web content management, as does Interwoven.

So what does this mean for you if you’re about to buy? You still need to be wary of LiveLink’s web credentials; this is unlikely to improve for some time as the company attempts to make the various products work together smoothly. And if you’re about to buy RedDot, bargain hard, because I think the prices are likely to come down.

A few other thoughts on the acquisition:

Philippe Parker on , , , | 7 May 2009

Contented Management

Missing the SharePoint

Let me firstly qualify this post by saying that I’m not inherently anti-Microsoft. I don’t use a Mac, I do use Microsoft Windows (even the mobile version) and Office and I’m using the beta version of Office Live Workspaces. But I just can’t fathom why people choose to use SharePoint.

As a pure document repository it is mostly harmless. It follows Microsoft security models so will only show users documents from file systems and folders they should have access to. Unless you’ve been unbelievably rigorous and consistent in your file naming and metadata conventions, however, its search will be utterly useless. Just search a MOSS intranet for “agenda” if you don’t believe me. The search is also hampered by some strange behaviour when looking at external systems with case sensitive URLs, so try before you buy. No wonder Microsoft have bought Fast.

There are some nice collaboration features: user homepages, instant messaging; but these are bound up in inaccessible HTML. So are the Web Parts, Microsoft’s equivalent of Java-based portlets. This is also true of many Java portals which are heavily dependent on JavaScript functionality and HTML table layouts.

There is a big difference between SharePoint and other portals, however. Java portal technology is built to the JSR standards, notably JSR168. This means that you can take pre-developed portlets and simply expose them through your portal. You can even send these to other portals through WSRP. But not with SharePoint. It doesn’t comply with Java Content Repository standards, so you’ll struggle to put develop a service oriented architecture around it. If you needed a single point of entry for web services that you can develop in .Net, you’d have to look at BEA’s AquaLogic, not SharePoint.

So what is SharePoint for? It doesn’t fit into a service oriented architecture, uses security models from file servers, doesn’t do federated search well and isn’t built to open standards. Do you really want to put that sort of technology at the hub of your organisation?

You can try out SharePoint through the Microsoft Online Customer Portal, although you’ll need a Windows Live ID.

Philippe Parker on , , | 25 March 2008