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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.

See also:

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

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 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

You speak the language, we do the grammar

When I was at university, I was one of a somewhat rare group who enjoyed structuralist critical theory. In a nutshell, this states that since all literature is made up of components of grammar (phonemes, adjectives, syntax, etc.) you can describe any text according to this grammar. At its most basic a narrative is state X → event Y → state Z which is different to state X.

Perhaps this is why content management appeals to me. There’s a set of paradigms (content types) that can be described through adjectives (metadata). There are verbs (workflow) and syntax (navigation), and content can be represented in different declensions (templates). But what the content management system is expressing is different each time. The content is the language, while the CMS is the grammar.

So an FAQ has similar composition whether it’s aimed at specialist user communities or the general public; a press release has the same structure whether it’s displayed in English or in French; content can have different “skins” depending on the person viewing the page. When implementing your content, I really don’t care what the content contains, just how people are going to produce and consume it.

A key point to remember about grammar however is that it evolves. Common usage changes the rules. How many supermarkets state “10 items or less” rather than the correct “10 items or fewer”? And how many people know the difference?

So you have to be aware that your requirements will change and the grammatical model for your CMS may need to evolve. If you pick a model with more complex content management processes — component-based systems like Tridion or Percussion say — you may find your users struggling initially. But if you pick simple page-based tools like EpiServer, your contributors may not be able to express themselves in the way they want, such as creating more complex content relationships.

So when picking a CMS technology, you need to think about the complexity of your content management tasks, the processes and structure you’ll want to exploit. Does the system speak your language? Try a few phrases and see. Get the suppliers to show you how you would achieve key tasks around content creation, publication and relationships and pick the language that isn’t double-Dutch.

Philippe Parker on , , | 19 December 2007 | Tweet this |