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Contented Management

Contented Management

SDL’s takeover of Alterian

SDL – who supply Tridion web content management – first announced it wanted to take over Alterian – purveyors of the CMS formerly known as Morello (Mediasurface) and Immediacy – in October. This week the Financial Times confirmed that an offer had been accepted. You can get the financial background to the takeover from the FT article, but while the companies are close to a formal merger, the software they supply remain poles apart.

As SDL continues to release modules and connectors to enhance the breadth of its web engagement offering, many of its customers find themselves operating dated user interfaces and struggling with the obscurities of Visual Basic scripting. If you put Tridion side by side with newer .Net CMS like Sitecore or EPiServer, you’d see the difference straight away.
Alterian’s WCM has a much slicker editorial user interface and delivers dynamic rather than static content. How you scale your website, integrate with other systems and personalise content therefore requires a completely different technical approach.

This personalisation aspect is particularly relevant as both vendors have been positioning themselves in the web engagement / customer experience market. Even though SDL is at the crest of Forrester’s online customer experience wave (and remains firmly ensconced in Gartner’s magic quadrant for web content management), I would argue that neither tool is that well-suited to handling the kind of user-generated content that some lighter weight open source tools like Drupal can offer. SDL seems to me to be particularly well geared to organisations that have a thought-through web content strategy, while what sets Alterian apart in online engagement is its social media marketing tool, SM2. Indeed, this is what SDL seems to covet most:

“We think that there are synergies with the marketing analytics and content delivery,” Mark Lancaster, SDL executive chairman, told the Financial Times.

Allow me to express some degree of scepticism here. Alterian have owned both WCM and SMM technology for over three years and made little (if any) headway in their integration. SDL may have greater resources to achieve this, but we’re looking at completely different products here. Any quick fixes would simply be a rebranding exercise with no under-the-bonnet coordination. Of course, SDL may have a clever plan and I stand to be corrected on that point.

Overall, I’m quite positive about the takeover. I think SDL will benefit from the niche benefits that Alterian brings, particularly in terms of focus on improving editorial interfaces. I think there’s a great opportunity for Alterian partners who previously worked with Immediacy to get to grips with a Tridion CMS that’s similar but more powerful than what they were previously used to. And I think that customers, particularly in Europe, will get a broader set of implementation partners to work with who have great web experience.
Yes, it’s yet another merger and apparently less choice in the market, but actually for the two software development teams, I hope it’s an opportunity for them to learn from each other and for synergy to mean establishing a really good, forward-thinking product rather than just an excuse to downsize.

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Philippe Parker on , , , , | 9 December 2011 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Early thoughts on Drupal Gardens

Geese in Stourhead gardens

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?

Philippe Parker on , , | 2 February 2010 | Tweet this |