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.