The new Premier League season is upon us in England and it was with some surprise that I noted Tottenham were being sponsored by Autonomy, purveyors of Bayesian probability and content management systems.
Professional integrity dictates that I shouldn’t exclude Autonomy from shortlists just because of who they sponsor, but this deal may cause those of you with taste to reconsider whether Autonomy are meeting their corporate and social responsibility targets. Yes, I am an Arsenal fan.
I was going to write an article that mapped each Premier League team to a WCM product, but realised I’d be sued by anyone I associated with Blackburn Rovers or Stoke City. Nevertheless, I think their are a number of useful analogies to be drawn

Beautiful doesn’t always mean effective

Some WCM products have editorial interfaces that entice you to play around with them: thoughtfully designed with user-friendly tools like drag and drop, red-lining, or DAM integration. Others practically repulse: ugly web forms with incomprehensible labelling and non-sensical reference data.

But don’t assume that a beautiful GUI makes for more effective content management processes. Just as Bolton Wanderers are restyling their footballing approach under Owen Coyle to be more appealing, this won’t mean they’ll finish higher than they used to under the ugly pragmatism of Sam Allardyce. Give free reign to your editors’ creative spark and you may find your content strategy going down the pan.

A solid financial basis

Virtually no Premier League football club is without debt. WCM vendors are in a less financially perilous situation but hardly paragons of financial stability. This should make you wary in your contractual dealings with them. Always hold proprietary source code in Escrow. It’s not much of a security but it’s better than none at all. Check the financial stability of services partners and weigh this against their ability to deliver: a team that’s doing badly is likely to have disincentivised staff and the best of them may be looking to leave.

Be wary too of cutting deals that actually disincentivise your suppliers: if you cut their profit margin too much they’ll focus on more profitable accounts when the going gets tough. And the last thing you want to do is see your team go into administration like Portsmouth last season.

Living off past glories?

Just as some Premier League clubs look down on new entrants and see themselves as the established top tier, some WCM vendors subscribe to a similarly blinkered view. Don’t choose a team just because they’re an established player and appear in an analyst’s magic quadrant. Take a look at the wider field and figure out what it is you’re really after from your supplier. Having a vendor with a good reputation in the industry won’t improve your website any more than winning the league 49 years ago makes you a better club today.

The long-term view

So if you’re ignoring the past, what abou the future? No need for Paul the octopus: take a look at company history. Has there been a recent big-money acquisition? If so, you can be certain that the vendor is going to be focussing more immediate efforts on proper integration of that product rather than on new features. Assimilating new players takes time, as Manchester City discovered last season.

Or was the last release community-driven? If you don’t have the means to engage actively with that community, how are you planning on getting the enhancement (and fixes) you need the product to deliver? You’re unlikely to hold any sway over the selection despite your investment.

Where’s the support?

A crucial consideration must be who’s going to support your team once you kick off. Is there a loyal and knowledgable fan base? Are they likely to up sticks for another trendier team the minute the going gets tough? And where are they? If all your support is in a different timezone, you’re going to have problems.

In my experience, transatlantic services particularly suffer from this Manchester United syndrome of long-distance support. Many European vendors have struggled to provide north American clients with the same levels of support as clients in Europe and the reverse is certainly true. The problem is is seldom resolved by takeovers, when a larger company may bring a much larger support team, but product experts remain few and far between.

It’s not about loyalty

In the end, remember the crucial difference between implementing a WCM and following a football team: you’re a client, not a fan. I’ll support Arsenal even when the players all inevitably collapse with cruciate ligament injuries before Christmas; I’m a lifelong fan. But if you’re not getting what you need from your team, relegate them and seek your glory elsewhere.

I’ve recently been working on a number of web content management system selections. My preference is to carry these out in a two-stage process (see the one-sheet guide to selecting a WCM). The first stage pre-qualifies suppliers according to client attitudes to cost, risk and technological preferences. The second stage then gets into the real tasks that you want to perform, discovering how the WCM enforces and informs processes.

Like most other people in this business, I approach this from the point of view that there is no best WCM, just different products that may be viable for different kinds of tasks. It’s about finding a product that will allow you to get started as quickly as possible without precluding later ambitions. I try to show clients what a WCM could do for them, and in turn client aspirations suggest product features. These usually centre around a number of core areas:

Editorial interface

How is content updated? Is it through a browser, a document template, or some other application? If it is through a browser, which browsers does it work in? Does it require a plug-in? How viable are those constraints within the organisation? If the organisation is planning to devolve editing, how appropriate are WYSIWYG and in situ editors? If content entry needs to be more controlled via forms, how will users preview their work? Can the WCM offer different editorial interfaces for different types of users? And hand in hand with the interfaces, if you have lots of devolved editors, how does the WCM assure concurrent contribution and secure access for different kinds of users?

Pages vs. elements

Some WCM only really have the concept of pages and associated assets, making it hard to re-use fragments of content across the site. This simple model is generally appropriate for two scenarios: where there are many devolved, occasional contributors who would be confused by having to perform multiple tasks to get a piece of content to update on one part of the site and wouldn’t immediately understand the implications of a more complex editorial change; and for sites which have quite user journeys with little information appearing in more than one place.
For sites which need to re-use content a lot, where there’s a central editorial team assuring that changes are propagated correctly, more advanced systems that use “fragments” of content in multiple locations across the site in an “edit once, publish many” model can bring significant business benefit. These content management models usually bring more flexible templates but they can also make it more difficult to audit content: what did a given page look like on a specific day and who made the content changes? They are also reliant on robust link cohesion, so that if you move a piece of content, the WCM continues to link to its new location.

Content structures

Absolutely central to most WCM is the concept of a content type. This is the model that allows you to define which fields editors need to complete to publish a page and the constraints on those: e.g. title (no more than 200 characters), summary (plain text), main body text (rich text), location (postal code), category (list of valid values), etc. These structures are important for a number of reasons. They allow you to create business rules for linking content, such as get me the three latest news items about Germany. They allow you to create different presentations for different types of content, so am event looks completely different from an FAQ. And they allow you to contol which information must be completed before content can go live and how it will be presented on different platforms once it’s been published.
There are other metaphors that WCM use to relate complex content: hierarchical metadata structures such as folders, categories or channels enable you to group content together in more complex ways. Flatter metadata structures also allow you to “traverse” across website structures and relate content in differnt part of the information architecture that don’t sit into this hierarchy. It’s often useful to have multiple kinds of metadata, particularly faceted taxonomy, if your content is particularly complicated and needs a lot of content relationships in order to achieved desired user journeys.

Technology

Where the WCM isn’t a standalone application but needs to integrate with other systems in a web platform – user directories, CRM, eCommerce, transactional tools – you need to validate how it will communicate with other systems. Is it through the Application Programming Interface (API), web services, or some other method?
The maintenance and extensibility of the system can also be important requirements. If I need to change a content type, what does that involve? If I need to get data from another application, can I do this in a de-coupled way?

Some other factors may come into play, such as workflow, internationaisation and personalisation. If one product is particularly strong in one of these areas and it’s a key requirement, then it may get into a shortlist even if it’s weaker in some of the other areas identified above.

This all brings me to the recent debate about whether WordPress is a CMS, with numerous contributions on Twitter as well as from:

• Jeff Cram: Is WordPress a CMS?
• Ian Truscott: Is WordPress a CMS? Hardly? Barely?
• CMS Watch: Evaluating WordPress as a web CMS
• Laurence Hart: What makes a CMS a CMS?

My experience of WordPress is that it’s really good at two key features where some established content management systems are relatively poor: search engine optimisation and comments. On SEO, it ties your blog post title to a friendly URL, enables good internal linking (as long as you don’t move any pages), allows tagging and categorisation and offers some great SEO tools. Comments meanwhile can be quite tricky for some WCM that operate separate content contribution and consumption environments, but WordPress does this easily, with useful anti-spamming tools and the ability to follow the comment conversation by RSS or email.

When it comes to the question of whether WordPress is or isn’t a WCM, the best analogy I could come up with was a camera phone. A camera phone does take pictures, it is convenient, some phones even have a flash and autofocus. But would you get a camera phone specifically to use as a camera? I think not if you’re serious about photography, It is a camera, but a very limited one.

WordPress is a blogging tool with some shared characteristics of a WCM. If you apply some of the many available modules to it you can come up with a really nice proposition, up to a point. But you’re effectively hacking the software to get it to behave as many WCM already do. You can get any software to do pretty much anything in the end, but that still doesn’t make it a WCM.

WordPress is widely used by many organisations as a web content management system and there are a lot of photos taken on camera phones. But you need to understand the product’s limitations and if these don’t affect you and you’re achieving what you want, then no one should criticise you for your choice. But let’s be sensible about it and say that even if there’s no such thing as the best WCM, you know that it wouldn’t be WordPress.

Last week, Acquia launched Drupal Gardens in beta. Speculation might have been more feverish had this not been on the same day as some company in Cupertino launched a new gadget. Nevertheless, Acquia’s offering is worth a second look.

Gardens is effectively Drupal 7 as a service: WCM hosted on the Amazon content delivery network. It includes a number of modules and is aimed very squarely at microsites and perishable campaign sites. It promises rapid deployment without needing a Drupal superhero to set up your site. You don’t need SQL, you don’t need PHP. You pick your URL, your templates, tools and styles, enter your content and you’re live.

And that represents what many people really understand by WCM.

You can create repeatable information architecture and consistent design elements from a library of themes and templates. You can use the Theme Builder to create custome content types. And it’s way friendlier than WordPress.com. Slicker too. People with very limited web knowledge can create websites even more easily than they used to in the days of Frontpage or Dreamweaver and go live with them, since Acquia take care of the hosting.

But this is very much WCM for websites that have content only. There’s nothing transactional and no sign yet of secure hosting that establishes private networking to your other online applications. It’s a great template editing tool to give to your design team or for small businesses to play around with, but not necessarily the tool that allows you to devolve complex editorial tasks to distributed authors. While the cloud-based aspect should allow you to scale your website delivery, it’s not clear whether it scales on the authoring side for people wanting to contribute content from around the world (which probably isn’t a central use case). It’s also worth noting what’s on the road map, because these are things that Gardens can’t yet do; such as multi-site search, multi-site configuration, and analytics.

Where Garens is a great fit is for clients who want a rapid time to deploy with minimal fuss. Why should clients concern themselves with APIs and hosting SLAs? Why should they have to engage with geeks just to change a template? Gardens resolves those issues by giving you a website builder and at a great price: it’s free throughout 2010 and only $20 to $40 per month per site after that, with flexibility over multi-site licences. But if you’re hoping that your website should be more than just vanity-ware, that it will increase revenues or reduce pressure on other streams by bringing transactions online, you’ll have to look at a content-driven application that has better integration points with other systems, or wait for this to be developed by Acquia.

I think Acquia’s move has implications for the wider WCM industry. Firstly, that the SaaS model has a valid use case which will permeate higher-end WCM; for example, Alterian CME is sort of available as a service through Verizon. Secondly, because many clients still understand (and want) WCM to be a tool for managing look and feel as well as content. Drupal Gardens achieves both those things. Can other vendors say the same?

How many websites these days are purely content-driven?

It’s hard to justify brochureware sites. How many people do business with you just because your website looks pretty? Organisations want websites that either generate an income or reduce pressure on more costly channels, like call centres. That means transactional web applications, not just web content management.

Yet content management is still required. Whether you’re updating marketing material to support your service offering or changing form labelling and layouts to ensure fewer drop-outs on transactions, the web team still needs to be able to make content changes without having to go through a lengthy development release process.

The simplest way to achieve this is to run two web applications separately, one driven by the content management system and the other by the transactional software, like eCommerce. You get your developers to style the two applications to look the same, run from similar URLs and hope that the web app gives you enough control to alter content that it’s responsible for, such as labels on form fields. This way you can keep system integration to a minimum. There are a couple of significant disadvantages, however. Firstly, if your site needs to change globally — a change to brand or navigation, for example — you have to update both systems. Secondly, you need to design your site in such a way that you keep content and transactions separate, which is very unlikely to lead to a successful user experience.

So what are your other options? You could take content managed through the CMS and embed it in the transactional application. This means that when you have a form field to complete which needs some guidance, that guidance can come from the CMS without the user having to abandon their transaction. But this creates problems of its own. You lose some of the key benefits of the CMS: relationships are harder to maintain between pieces of content and preview becomes nearly impossible.

This is why the transactional application is often embedded in the CMS. FatWire, for example, has just launched its Web Experience Management Framework, which should make this process easier, while Terminal Four also touts its integration with external systems. Yet irrespective of the CMS you use, you’re going to face some integration problems. There’s bound to be an element of custom code, issues with assuring decent performance from both the CMS and the transactional application, and above all design difficulties ensuring that the security of the user’s transaction is maintained by the delivery layer.

Another option is portal technology. In theory, portals enable you to deliver all your web applications in an integrated fashion and what’s more, do so incrementally, adding applications without having to change the core configuration. They’re also usually pretty good at managing sessions and user credentials. Portals bring their own problems however, not least cost of delivery, increased time to develop and un-friendly URLs.

So all four approaches have positives and negatives. There’s a niche in that market somewhere for a vendor. Until someone proves they’ve filled that niche however, you’re unlikely to be able to deliver a great business-driven website using just a web content management system.

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.

Alas, poor clients

How many people could say that they were happy with their implementation? Even those case studies I saw were tinged with regret at missing features or how long the process took. The conference was littered with people who’d wasted budget and wanted to share their hindsight. And these were the enlightened ones.

The industry protests too much, methinks

But while those of us in the industry can easily put errors down to naïvety, I think it’s time we took a long hard look at ourselves. How can we tell users that CMS is like complex machinery which should involve substantial training and even change management? That’s an appalling attitude to user requirements.

Don’t try to make people change… do something that can’t already be done. (Euan Semple)

When every survey shows usability as the top area of dissatisfaction with CMS, what’s preventing vendors from making a friendlier system? As Seth Gottlieb points out, they’re all as bad as each other.

Slings (and boxes) and arrows

Creating and maintaining content should be simple enough for devolved editorial teams to perform with little training. The tricky thing is creating high quality content to suit an audience’s needs. Yet few CMS will ease editors through this process or evaluate their content against style guides. We’re beginning to see a few technologies in this area, but these are just sold as add-ons to an already bloated feature set.

The play’s the thing

It seems the industry has been blind to the truth. Features are specified but never used. Vendors add functionality so that they can score highly in analyst reports and avoid being excluded from shortlists, but all they’re doing is making it more difficult for users to create a compelling web presence.
To be or not to be
WCM was once a breakthrough in enabling less technical users to publish web content relatively quickly. But has it really progressed in the last few years? I don’t think so. We just have more modules piled onto re-skinned interfaces. Can’t we have friendlier tools for delivering a content strategy? Otherwise WCM will see some other application usurp its role and seduces its client base, which would be a tragedy for the industry.

More on #fixwcm

• Jon Marks, including links to other post on the theme.
• #fixwcm tweets

More on #jboye09

• J. Boye participants
• My conference presentation — succeed fast

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:

• WCM Magic Quadrant – Sorry guys, but I am a fan of Gartner
• What has the Ministry of Magic Quadrants got against me?
• Gartner Magic Quadrant lawsuit: Sour grapes or real gripes?

Social WCM
Of course the web is social, but WCM has traditionally made quite clear distinctions between authoritative content that’s created and approved by authenticated users, and content that’s produced by non-authoritative sources, i.e. external users. This distinction has been somewhat blurred by people recently and vendors have had to respond to blogging software like WordPress that makes it far easier to add comments and user profiles. Many WCM vendors who previously didn’t provide social features now tout their software as web 2.0 ready and this is a signficant area of product development. Moreover, if you look at the ECM sector, vendors are focussing heavily on use of these social features to improve internal business processes, aka Enterprise 2.0.

Web campaign management
Your website is a marketing channel: understanding your market and its responsiveness to campaigns is increasingly important. Many WCM vendors are heavily promoting the campaign management side of their products and developing improved campaign reporting features. The aquisition of Mediasurface by Alterian and the inclusion of content management as part of an “integrated marketing platform” is a good indication of where one branch of the industry is heading. FatWire is also developing marketing products as part of what it calls its Web Experience Management Suite.

Content quality
If you’re going to use the web to market heavily and you have a lot of content, you need to ensure that your website meets the standards you have set your organisation. There are a number of tools on the market that help editorial teams assure that quality (such as those from Vamosa and SiteImprove). We’re also seeing vendors like SDL Tridion adding these modules to their core product offering. Assuring the quality of your web content should be a key aspect of WCM and these features are particularly welcome for distributed authoring teams.

Clearly, these three trends represent a far from exhaustive list, but they do go some way to illustrate how suppliers are positioning themselves in the WCM market. Hopefully this will give clients some degree of differentiation and an awareness of possibilities that web content management can offer them now.

If you want to know more about trends in the industry, take a look at this list of feeds.

Firstly, if you think your organisation’s web presence is only the content generated in your organisation from your processes, you’ve completely misunderstood what the web is about. Your visitors aren’t just going to your site; they’re visiting sites all over the web. If you think they only want your “enterprise” content you’ve buried your head in the sand.

Secondly, if your website has a dedicated editorial team with a content strategy and proper style guides – and it should – they may well be resistant to the idea that anyone can be a web author as long as they use enterprise content management tools and processes.

The website is rarely just an end point or simple publishing channel for the documents your organisation creates. It’s market-driven. It’s meant to provide the information that your audience needs. Whether the website is designed to generate revenue (sell products) or to save money (stop people using more expensive channels like call centres), it needs to be managed so that your visitors can achieve their goals as simply as possible.

It’s because the creation of web content often sits outside enterprise processes that dedicated web content management software exists and stands alone from ECM. A good WCM will simply focus on making it as easy as possible to manage content created solely for publishing to the web, to be read on the web, by a specific audience.

There are of course many organisations who need to relate their website more closely to the rest of their activities. But what’s required isn’t just a piece of software that tacks “web” as a status on the end of a long workflow. You need a process that allows the website to request information from the rest of the organisation so you can deliver your web strategy.

If you view your website as a place where you can publish the “stuff” that your organisation produces, you’ll end up with enterprise web content management, and it will be bad for everyone involved. If you want a good website, make sure it’s a driver in your organisation and not a passenger.

My own, brief take is that content management has to face a number of challenging questions over the next couple of years.

Will content need to be managed?
Content management currently focuses on providing tools for groups to create, review and retrieve content so that an approved version of that content can be made available to predefined audiences. User-generated content and the broadcast models of social networking challenge that focus.

1. Anyone can view content: most tweets go to everyone rather than direct to individuals.
2. Anyone can contribute content in a UGC world.
3. Distinguishing what’s your organisation’s content and what’s individual is becoming increasingly fraught; just take a look at any blogger’s site for disclaimers even though they’re blogging about their company’s services.

Will content need context?
Even in the least structured repositories (wikis, flickr, twitter) content is still tagged so that it can be retrieved. But the onus is on the user to find the right tag and on a search application to enable this. This is quite different from a CMS, where the software provides contextual models like folders and related documents to guide the user through an information architecture. As search interfaces and technology improves, there will be less need to provide those contextual models. I have my doubts that semantic mark-up will help people create more relevant content, but I do think that improvements to search will mean that content will be “find-able” and “relate-able” anywhere, even if it isn’t in the right taxonomical folder.

Will content need to be deleted?
As volumes of content continues to increase and contextualisation decreases, finding relevant content amid all the dross will become harder. I think that this will be an even bigger business driver than cost of storage for deleting content that’s irrelevant. But because distinguishing “approved” and strategic content will be harder, it will also be hard to identify which content is dross and what might be useful. Socially-driven records management is bound to take a stab at this problem, but whichever content management tool can help people to get rid of useless content is going to be a winner in the long term.