Last week I attended the Oracle User Group UK conference, with warm enthusiasm and a heavy cold. User groups can be a great way for clients to share implementation experiences, as well as an opportunity to collar suppliers and get a less sanitised view on product roadmaps. I have heard that the Stellent user community wasn’t particularly active, but Oracle are well used to running user groups for the rest of their product range, so this was part of a very large event.

One speaker (I’ll preserve his anonymity) who seemed to strike a chord with delegates raised the point that his organisation’s implementation partner seemed relatively uninformed about Stellent, and that poor decisions around customisation and bespoke development had led to a poor reputation for the product. We’ve already discussed the product vs. implementation issue in a previous post, but the fact that lots of Stellent clients seemed to have the same problem suggests two things to me.

Firstly, the product may be difficult to implement well. Customisations tend to be required for content entry, so perhaps Stellent didn’t know its audience as well as it should have done. This view is perhaps corroborated by the latest release of version 10gR3 which is now bundled with the Ephox rich text editor (already supplied with IBM content manager and Vignette). This attempts to address some of Site Studio’s issues with cross-platform compatibility and accessibility.

Secondly, there’s a problem with product understanding, not just among implementation partners but within Oracle itself. The Stellent partner base in the UK has traditionally been relatively small. Small systems integrators have focussed on the product’s document management capabilities, with web publishing seen as something of a bonus feature rather than an end in itself. The partners are not web specialists, while the real web specialists — design and build media agencies — haven’t really invested in the product because they see it as more than just web, potentially stretching their capabilities. This is exacerbated by the need to train developers in a proprietary scripting language, IDOC.

Now the limited numbers of the core Stellent team are being swelled by Oracle’s professional services arm. But these aren’t content management specialists, and that’s obvious to many clients who may balk at paying Oracle’s day rates in return for staff on a steep learning curve.

So the user group is turning out to be a really useful forum for all involved. Clients can avoid repeating each other’s implementation errors, while the supplier gets to grips with the common business challenges their client base is trying to address. It’s a bit of role reversal, but hopefully this form of social networking will lead to ECM 2.0.