There are many views on the future of content management, but what of the present tense? I wanted to highlight a few trends that we’re seeing from WCM software vendors.

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.