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Contented Management

Contented Management

Devolving complexity

Combined harvester

What sort of editorial model do you follow for your web content management? Do you try to get as many as possible hands-on, or do you run everything through a centralised editorial team?

It’s ironic that WCMS which enable you to perform more advanced content management provide tools that you probably won’t want to devolve to part-time editorial teams. Conversely, simpler WCMS are often chosen by by smaller, centralised teams who often feel constrained by the software they use.

Vignette, for example, enables you to assign content to various taxonomies through folders, projects and channels, so that content can be cross-referenced extensively across your site. Put these taxonomies in the hands of people who don’t understand them and you’ll create convoluted user journeys: the exact opposite of your content management objectives.

Alterian’s corporate offering meanwhile — once known as Immediacy — provides pretty basic content management. Most users should be able to get their head around its tools pretty easily. But if you want to create more complex content relationships or have content fragments re-used across your sites, you’re better off with Alterian’s enterprise product, known as Morello. Devolving editorial responsibilities to part-timers who don’t fully understand the consequences of updating content that’s used in lots of places in your websites is decidedly risky, however.

In larger organisations, lots of people will produce content for the web sporadically. These people will change, have variable knowledge of the software and writing style guides, and limited understanding of your website. The last thing they need is a piece of software that allows them to break stuff because they just don’t get it.

So, do you:

  1. select a simple WCM for devolved teams to create pages in predefined templates; or
  2. select a complex WCM that enables you to perform more advanced content management tasks, but centralise the editorial process.

The more you want to cross-reference and re-use content across your sites, the greater your need for an advanced tool and an expert team to manage it. But if you want to devolve authorship, you’ll need to keep content management tasks and software as simple as possible. Don’t try to industrialise content production by providing everyone with more machinery. For broader participation you need to provide hand tools. Leave the combined harvester in the hands of experts.

Philippe Parker on , , , | 8 December 2009

Contented Management

How to read Gartner

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is stirring up emotions again. This time ZL Technologies have launched a law suit against the analyst firm, essentially claiming that its methods are biased and obscure. We’re not industry analysts, or partners of any of the vendors, so we’re not too bothered about who’s in Gartner’s good books. It makes a big difference to the vendors, however, since Gartner is such a dominant influence in the industry and so many clients assume that if a product’s in the Magic Quadrant, it must be the best.

And yet, this precisely contradicts Gartner’s own advice:

Gartner advises organizations against simply selecting vendors that appear in the Leaders quadrant. All selections should be buyer-specific, and vendors from the Challengers, Niche Players or Visionaries quadrants could be better matches for your business goals and solution requirements.

But what clients and many consultants see is the graph, and this is what they decide on. We’ve worked with many of the WCM products assessed by Gartner and conducted many technology selections for clients. They want the best product, not a niche player.

But what do you want to do with your CMS? Don’t you want to achieve things that other people aren’t doing, within business structures that will be difficult to change, aimed at specific audiences? Isn’t that a niche? Then why wouldn’t you consider a niche product?

Just because a vendor has a more complete vision, doesn’t mean it offers all the features that niche products do. In fact, the completeness of vision is based on many other criteria, including market understanding and strategy, sales strategy, business model and geographic strategy. These are all important, but do they really have a bearing on your business requirements?

We’d rather come and ask you what you’re trying to achieve, point out the things that any CMS will do and some of your issues that only certain products are likely to solve well. We’ll suggest you look at those but warn you about some of their weak points. If you’re then concerned that the vendor’s marketing strategy isn’t up to scratch, go and take a look at their financial viability. But every vendor Gartner assessed had WCM revenues in excess of $8 million in 2008,  so they aren’t small fry.

Nevertheless, you have to question the neutrality of a firm that takes a significant proportion of its revenue from advising the vendors on product development, but doesn’t disclose what that revenue is. As a buyer, you should question whether the criteria are relevant and whether the assessments are fair.

So what benefit can you get from the report?

Firstly, you get a list of products. That’s not a trite observation. In a market with several hundred vendors — and seemingly more each day popping out of the Scandinavian CMS womb — it’s useful to be able to limit the products you’re considering to those that have a considerable industry presence. Gartner will shortly be adding open source WCM to the proprietary software it currently evaluates.

Secondly, you get some ammunition with which to question vendors. If EPiServer is heavily focussed on expanding into the US market, you should be asking how much of their core team is still in Europe and able to deal with your concerns. (This is true of many of the European vendors.) Similarly, if you read between the lines on cautions about Vignette, you’ll need to ask how many of their clients are actually using the latest version of their product which they’re so keen to sell you.

So how should you read Gartner? With interest, and with caution.

Some further reading:

Philippe Parker on , , | 22 October 2009

Contented Management

Why do projects cost so much?

Why do Enterprise Content Management systems cost about five times as much as their top-tier web content management equivalents? Do they offer five times as much functionality? Are they five times less likely to fail? Are they significantly more usable? Generally, not.

But the operational savings that can be achieved with ECM are significantly greater than those typically made by rolling out WCM: there are time savings in information retrieval, cost savings in storage and reduced risk of compliance failure. You would expect these savings to be worth a great deal to most large organisations. Consequently, vendors can sell licences and services at a far higher cost than WCM.

Greater web content management costs can be justified in environments where devolved authorship, strong version control and compliance with web publishing standards are all required. This means that vendors can sell product licences at £200,000 knowing that what they offer can’t be achieved simply by installing WordPress. Commercial open source follows the same approach, but with pricing focussed on support and services.

It’s basic economics, but it’s worth recalling when you feel the costs of your implementation are running out of control. Products and services cost so much because clients tell suppliers that’s what they’re worth. It’s not up to your supplier to calculate your ROI; it’s up to the person paying the bill to do that.

The buyer sets a budget based on the benefits the project will bring, or the cost of not doing the project. Suppliers try to provide a solution that will bring about the benefits within the budget constraints. Together, they set up governance to ensure that the project doesn’t overrun or overspend, so that the business case remains viable.

The goal is not to deliver your project as cheaply as possible. It is to deliver the project in line with the specified business case. If you can save money then great, but if you’ve achieved your objectives, don’t worry that you might have been able to do it cheaper. Just bask in the contentment of having completed a successful project, an achievement that eludes so many.

See also Peter Sejersen’s article on whether you should reveal your budget when inviting tenders.

Philippe Parker on 20 August 2009

Contented Management

Thoughts on the CMS debate

Last week I attended the Future of Web Content Management Debate hosted by Squiz at Australia House. I met many interesting people and saw a range of presentations from analysts, customers and software vendors. I’m not sure that the future of the WCM was really debated that much, but perhaps the acquisition of enterprise search engine Funnelback by Squiz tells us that content management may well be rendered obsolete by improved information retrieval technologies… The debate instead seemed to focus on the advantages of open source content management software, as you might expect given that Squiz is an open source CMS vendor.

But why should open source even be a consideration when selecting a CMS? Increasingly we see drives by government and other organisations to promote open source, but as Adriaan Bloem points out, the only generalisation you can really make about open source software is legal: the licence. So unless being able to get into the nuts and bolts of the application and feeding back into its source are important to you, then open source shouldn’t really matter.

What should matter, and is often confused with the open source requirement, is:

  • cost: initial licences, project costs and on-going support;
  • who’ll carry out the development and support: an external supplier or an in-house team;
  • relationship with your suppliers and how easy it is to change them if something goes wrong without throwing away your technology;
  • upgrade path: ensuring you don’t over-customise your application so that you can’t move off it once it has outlived its usefulness.

Certainly, open source has a strong case to make with many of these issues, but fundamentally choosing the right CMS is about matching business requirements and budget to a technology and supplier, not about licence models. Hopefully the one-sheet guide we just published will help you in this respect.

Many thanks to Squiz for organising the debate and in particular to Kenton Ward, who was very open about his company and its development approach. Kenton also organises the Last Thursday group who meet in Shoreditch on the last Thursday of each month to discuss content management. Do join us!

Philippe Parker on 7 July 2009

Contented Management

A one-sheet guide to picking a CMS

I’ve been trying to consolidate my thoughts on content management technology selection (a large number of which are collated on this site) into something more digestible.

So I’ve come up with this one-sheet guide to picking a CMS (rich text format, 41KB).

The guide is based on reading the many excellent posts on this subject from across the web (you can find a few of these on del.icio.us), discussions with colleagues and my own experiences in tweaking this process on client projects over the years.

Of course, reducing the process to a single page does mean that some of the finer points about how you achieve these tasks can’t be captured fully, but the key purpose is that people who haven’t been through a CMS selection before understand the main tasks involved and the order in which they should be undertaken. The document should also assist those of us who help clients select a CMS to focus on the most significant issues.

It’s not meant to be definitive, so please do let me know your comments: twitter’s the best place to do this. I’ll happily update this page and the document as required.

Philippe Parker on 6 July 2009

Contented Management

CMS trade-in deals

Fatwire is waiving licence fees for clients who migrate to its CMS from Vignette or Interwoven. Both these vendors have traditionally had quite expensive licensing models so there are potentially big savings to be made, although FatWire has a feature set that is probably closer to Vignette than to Interwoven.

The catch is that you need to procure migration services through FatWire, but they’ve partnered with content migration specialists who you’d probably use anyway. You just lose some flexibility on negotiating the price, but you’re going to be saving money anyway.

But does that make it a worthwhile exercise? As Irina Guseva points out, the project inevitably costs more than the licence, so the cost of migrating may well be more than your existing Vignette or Interwoven maintenance costs.

More importantly, the reasons for migrating are wrong. You shouldn’t abandon your CMS just because you can get a better deal elsewhere. It’s not like switching an electricity supplier to get a better rate. Just moving from one CMS platform to another is unlikely to resolve the content management issues you’ve been experiencing. You need to think about which problems you’re going to solve then pick the processes and technologies that will address these.

FatWire’s rescue package doesn’t make a business case to move away from Vignette or Interwoven, but it does put the product on the shortlist if you are migrating. For dynamic-driven Java websites, you have to consider FatWire, but it’s not a shorlist of one. Remember, open source products don’t have licence costs either.

So let’s commend FatWire for their marketing effort, and if you’re looking to migrate from a platform other that those mentioned, ask FatWire if they’ll cut you the same deal. But don’t trade in your existing CMS just to get a better price. Address your issues, conduct due diligence and pick a product that meets your requirements.

A couple of useful links:

Philippe Parker on , , | 16 June 2009

Contented Management

People or software?

There’s a seemingly never-ending debate as to whether you choose your web content management software first or the team to deliver it. I’ve passed some comment on this myself in the past. It really comes down to Strategy 101. Are you looking to improve productivity or growth?

If you’re trying to improve your website’s revenue streams the software will offer you little. There are of course CMS out there that are sold by integrated marketing campaigners, and there are other CMS that offer strong personalisation capabilities. But fundamentally, it’s the concept and the design that will make your website better, not the underlying technology.

That’s not to say that you won’t make your life more difficult by picking the wrong tool; if you need to deliver personalised content with a CMS that only offers static delivery, for example. But if it takes you 20 minutes longer to produce the right content for your audience and deliver better advocacy and revenue, that’s a hindrance you may well choose to accept.

Nevertheless, CMS are fundamentally about improving editorial processes and governance. So if you’re trying to improve your content classification, link with other systems (like your LDAP directory) or make devolved authorship of your website easier, you must find the right tool to do this. If you pick the wrong product, you will be in for a world of painful customisations that will damage your operations in the longer term.

Of course, projects rarely have a single objective that’s exclusively sales or operations focussed. There is usually a weighting one way or the other, however.

  1. If the operational side is more important, look at the software first.
  2. If the marketing side is more important, go to an agency and ask them to recommend the CMS.
  3. If you’re trying to do both, let the agencies and vendors decide who they want to partner with in order to deliver your requirements.

More on technology selection:

Philippe Parker on 18 May 2009

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

Setting standards

CMS vendors are under constant pressure to improve their products. They add features their competitors lack (or that are perceived as lacking in their own product), provide what they hope will be prettier and more intuitive administration interfaces and increasingly integrate with other applications.

Increasingly we see vendors trying to make their products meet industry-defined standards. This could be CMIS, ECM maturity, or feature tables that are readily comparable.

But how do these standards help you as a buyer or end-user of the CMS? A multi-lingual installation package or a product rated as highly mature do not guarantee a successful solution to your content management requirements. I applaud the vendors who are trying to improve the technology, but I don’t think the analysts and architects would be doing their clients a good service by telling them that these standards somehow make the products better.

As a client selecting or supporting your content management software, you need to think about the tasks that are most critical (e.g. must run on my infrastructure) and most frequent. If your CMS is easy to install but you can’t tell when content you’ve published will go live, you have a really serious problem. If your workflow requirements can’t be met, it doesn’t matter if the content sits in a JCR-compliant repository.

You need to focus on your own day-to-day needs, not on the industry telling you what a great product it offers. Set your own standards and be sceptical about other people’s.

Philippe Parker on | 31 March 2009

Contented Management

Shortlisting your CMS

Having asked yourself what problems your content management system should address, you reach the stage in the selection exercise where you can shortlist some products. This does NOT mean going to Gartner, Butler or Forrester and picking whatever’s in the magic quadrant. That is a recipe for expensive mistakes.

There will be a lot of software on the market that can help to overcome your problems. You can whittle these down by placing other constraints on your selection process.

Due diligence: have you involved the right people?

Your project will need buy-in from various stakeholders. If you haven’t got their buy-in by the time you shortlist products, you’ll be facing all kinds of political issues even if you pick exactly the right tool. But you need input from all the relevant parties. What benefit do you get from excluding people in communications or marketing, hands-on content editors, technical support and development (whether these are in-house or a trusted service provider), the people in charge of your IT strategy, and of course, procurement. Not only do all these parties have a stake in the selection process; they’ll be able to contribute something constructive too.

How long will you keep the technology for?

Clearly your shouldn’t be looking to keep the technology for longer than the duration of your web or content strategy. If you’re planning to keep something for longer than you know what you’re going to do with it, you’ll probably get into a mess. So, if you have a clear strategy, you’ll want a product with a roadmap to match. If you’re just trying to satisfy short-term goals, you’ll probably want something that’s easy to deploy rather than highly extensible. Having an awareness of how long you’ll want to keep the software for will also help to inform your business case.

Do you really need just a single content management system?

Firstly, you need to understand the limitations of a CMS; it won’t do everything you need. You may need an additional search engine, it won’t satisfy eCommerce requirements, it probably won’t allow much in the way of personalisation, forms created in it will be pretty limited, it’s unlikely to stream live audio or video… these are all best served by distinct applications (which can mean a difficult integration project). So manage your stakeholders’ expectations and constrain your project objectives.

Now consider whether a single CMS is right for your organisations. Are different departments contributing to the CMS likely to need to share content or code? Or could they each have their own devolved system with a common interface for delivery, such as a portal? Will there be licencing or training cost benefits from a having a single CMS?

Work out your budget

Figure out what you can afford, then build your business case. As a rule of thumb, in order to get something workable and fully tested, you’ll need to spend upwards of 75% of your budget on services as opposed to software and database licences. This is likely to cross a whole range of software off your long-list right away.

Baseline your technology

Why does your CMS need to be Java or .Net? Is this your existing in-house skill set? If not, do you really want to invest in re-training? If you have no in-house team, do you really care what technology the CMS is built in? Shouldn’t it just be the cheapest available? Java and .Net are useful if you know you’re going to have a number of integration exercises with applications in those technologies. Otherwise your technological prerequisites may be a costly red herring.

Invite both software vendors and integration partners together

Encourage all participants to do pitch together. In my experience, no web CMS vendor has sufficient in-house experience to address all the services issues in a web project: information architecture, interface design, even systems integration. Conversely, the only services companies you’ll find who know a product inside out will be those who have ex-employees from the vendor. And even then, these developers won’t know the product roadmap or the best practice that the software supplier has gleaned from its many clients over the years. Get them together and have a happy menage-à-trois.

You now have your requirements and your constraints. You should be in a better positioni to shortlist suppliers. If you don’t know where to start in drawing up this list, you can contact us.

Philippe Parker on 12 December 2008
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