Buyers, press and analysts alike tend to focus exclusively on functional requirements and vendor viability when evaluating vendors. What is too often completely overlooked is the valuable vendor community of references, developer network and partner channels.

While the community might be both harder and more time-consuming to evaluate than features  and financial results, almost every successful project I have ever come across, had involvement from the wider vendor community. Here are some examples of what people have done:

• talking to references before procurement to save money and again before going live to share lessons learned and avoid repeating expensive mistakes
• finding and engaging an experienced partner for implementation assistance and training
• meeting with seasoned developers to get up-to-speed on the all important details

The very big vendors, e.g. IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, have all made a serious commitment to nurture their community, mostly through partners, online forums for developers and annual mega conferences. As a customer this brings several benefits, including easy access to training and several ways to learn more about the products. As an example, Oracle has their online Oracle Technology Network, more than 450 local user groups and their OpenWorld conferences, which annually brings some 40,000+ delegates to San Francisco.

Among the smaller vendors, e.g. Alfresco, CoreMedia, Day Software, FatWire, Percussion and Sitecore, you find significantly smaller communities and it is often much harder with the smaller vendors to assess the usefulness of the community. Some might have a strong online community or a vibrant group of users that meet regularly on a regional level, while with others there might not be any of this.

You can always ask your sales representative for a list of references that you can talk to. Beyond talking to peers, chances are that with a smaller vendor you will find it difficult to find experienced partners or developers.

Regardless of the size of vendor you are evaluating, make sure to set time aside to consider the community.

Imagine a world without the collaborative tools we take for granted today. Decades before the emergence of the Internet and World Wide Web, computer pioneers were building Plato, a system that pioneered chat rooms, e-mail, instant messaging, online forums and message boards, and remote screen sharing. 

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself. -Plato

Plato (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) was the world’s first computer-aided teaching system and it was built in 1960 at Computer-based Education Research Lab (CERL) at the University of Illinois and eventually comprised over 1,000 workstations worldwide. It was in existence for forty years and offered coursework ranging from elementary school to university-level.  

Social computing and collaboration began on Plato in 1973. That year, Plato got Plato Notes (message forums), Talk-o-matic (chatrooms), and Term-talk (instant messaging).  

Plato was also a breeding ground for today’s technology innovators. Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes and Microsoft’s chief software architect, worked on the Plato system in the 1970s as an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Many others including Dave Woolley, who wrote Plato Notes at the age of 17, Kim Mast, who wrote Personal Notes (the e-mail system) in 1974 at the age of 18, and Doug Brown, creator of Talk-o-matic, continued to develop collaborative technologies in their careers.  

Don Bitzer, credited by many as the “father of Plato,” is the co-inventor of the plasma display and has spent his career focusing on collaborative technologies for use in the classroom.  

This week we celebrate Plato’s 50th anniversary. Why a week and not a day? I spoke with Brian Dear, whose book on Plato (The Friendly Orange Glow: The Story of the Plato System and the Dawn of Cyberculture) will be published later this year,told me “[I]t’s hard to pin down an exact date, due to a) it being open to interpretation as to what qualifies as the first day — when the project got green-lighted? when they started designing it? when a system was actually up and running? when they did the first demo? — and b) there’s little lasting documentary evidence from those earliest weeks.”  

“May 1960 was when Daniel Alpert’s interdisciplinary group that had held meetings for weeks about the feasibility of the lab embarking on an automated teaching project, finally submitted its report to Alpert. He read it, thought about it, and decided to ignore the group’s recommendation to not proceed. Instead he asked if a 26-year-old PhD named Don Bitzer wanted to have a go at it, and Bitzer agreed. Consequently, on June 3, Alpert wrote up his own report to the Dean of the Engineering School, which instead of reiterating his group’s recommendation to not go forward with a computer education project, stated that they were indeed going forward. Bitzer went right to work on it, brought in others to help with the hardware and software, and they had a prototype up and running pretty quickly that summer. The rest is history.”  

David M. Goldes is the president of Basex.

Like most source communities, Drupal has been struggling with their marketing, at least in terms of reaching beyond developers. During a recent exercise to come up with a new slogan, Dries Buytert, the creator of Drupal suggested:

come for the software, stay for the community

This seemed to resonate well with the energetic and developer-friendly Drupal community. To me though, it raised a few questions:

1. Is this really how you should select Drupal, or for that matter any other content management system?
2. Is the Drupal community really that good?

During the past years I’ve been arguing that you should not only look at the software when you select a new CMS. You should look features and also consider aspects such as documentation, roadmap, partners, support and yes, community. Real Story Group, the vendor-neutral analyst firm formerly known as CMS Watch, calls this “intangibles” and has increasingly emphasised this in their product evaluations over the years.

Moreover, I recently argued that developers and not software features, were the real key to success. This lead to a session at our Philadelphia conference earlier this month, where we asked whether the community is really more important than the CMS. In my view, the community is very important and something you should consider before you select any product.

So, does the new Drupal slogan indicate that the software is the best part of the project? Perhaps. But do look beyond the software before you select any CMS. As an example, Drupal has fewer experienced implementation partners than most comparable content management systems.

I would say that Drupal has a very dedicated and large community, mostly populated by developers. The community is especially strong within the media industry. The Drupal developers don’t just meet online; they meet regularly face-to-face, including at the bi-annual DrupalCon conferences, where an impressive 3,000+ registered for the San Francisco edition held this past April.

The interesting thing with Drupal, is that the term community has a few different meanings. Drupal is really engineered with community-driven content in mind, e.g. as known from many news sites, where readers can comment on articles and web managers can build their own little villages.

With community playing a significant role in all-things-Drupal, I’ll suggest a perhaps more fitting slogan:

come for the community, stay for the community

In other words, don’t select Drupal just because you have requirements for community-driven content and Drupal is a good fit: Select Drupal only if you have also talked to the community and have a plan for how to engage with it.

Just started reading Drupal’s Dries Buytaert’s blog posting tiled, Joomla vs Drupal: business models and commercial ecosystem. The article comes just a week after he attended CMS Expo and are some of his thoughts on the Drupal/Joomla! comparisons many of us do with open source CMS.

But what does the future hold? The Drupal community seems to be expanding into the enterprise, whereas the Joomla community is expanding into, well … Drupal. All the Joomla companies that I talked to at CMSExpo were in the process of taking their products and services to the Drupal market and rebranding their organizations to be cross-CMS compatible.

When time allows, I may add my own thoughts about Dries’ article in this post as well as a comment over at Buytaert.net. In the meantime, please be sure to read the comments in the article (no flame war so far, yea!) as there is a lot of substance in the comment section too.

The Onion implemented version 4.7 of Drupal several years back and mightily hacked core for the functionality and performance it needed. Recently, the Onion – a company with a number of staff developer resources – decided to migrate to a different WCMS (Django) that they felt was more of a programmers’ framework than that of Drupal. Their decision to abandon Drupal for a different project is regrettable, since their team’s experience could really have helped improve Drupal these past few years and The Onion would have benefited in the process.

Complete Story

Almost two years ago, Markus and I started writing about RedDot CMS. First, both of us on their own, then together in Markus’ blog. Pretty soon the idea emerged to found a blog specifically about RedDot, as public available documentation and discussion was nonexistent at that time. Soon other developers joined in making the RedDot CMS blog a huge success.

“Quit while you’re ahead”, people say – so do I.

For over 5 years now I’ve been working as a RedDot expert, fiddling around with almost every nut and bolt of that system. Those were quite interesting years and a lot happened to the small software company “RedDot” based in Oldenburg, Germany. First the acquisition by Hummingbird, then the absorption of both of them by Open Text. In my opinion, this was a huge turning point, and not everything is turning to the better:

Giving up the lead

RedDot CMS was once ahead in the game, providing techniques like WYSIWYG editing, e.g. the famous red dot, which made it easy – even for untrained editors – to see, what the published page will look like. RedDot missed out important user interface trends and Open Text continued to do so. Even the smallest Open Source CMS today has features like quick interface response through AJAX and similar techniques, quick in-place editing, drag & drop support, etc. They have clean, well thought out interfaces and most important: They are fully cross-browser compliant. Up to OTMS v10, the CMS had none of this and the recent changes are more desperate efforts to catch up, rather than leading the business.

Heads in the cloud, problems on the ground

The software platform itself is in desperate need of a major overhaul. Big parts are still written in classic ASP (VBScript), if you ever had a look at the code you know it’s really messy. With Open Text, the main goal became to integrate the rest of the company’s software products. Basically, this is just fine but when you look at the roadmap for the next versions (up to 2012), they list 7 (seven!) products/technologies which are about to be stuffed into the system. With the recent acquisition of Nstein, I guess you can increase that number once more.

Besides that, if you saw some Open Text presentations lately, the buzzword machines are working overtime: Instead of talking about Social Open Enterprise 2.0 Web Cloud thingy stuff™, take care of the product foundation you want to base your visions on. Before buzz-talking about Web 3.0, learn to master Web 1.0 first!

Business etiquette

Last but not least, I’m deeply fed up with the way Open Text (at least in Germany) treats their long-term partners in a quite unpartner-like way. Period. I won’t go much into detail here, as this is a long list of annoyances and I don’t want to get personal. But don’t get me wrong, there are still some cool guys there I know from the old RedDot days, I had the opportunity to work with them on some projects and had great conversations and discussions – thank you guys!

<!IoRangeNoRedDotMode>

So it’s time for me to move on, there are still so many interesting things to explore and new projects to work on. A big “Thank you” to all of you, who read this blog, who contributed and made this blog a tremendous success. I learned a lot, and we definitely have the coolest blog crew around. It really was a great time, guys!

KTHXBAI!

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The perennial “what is a CMS” debate broke out this week, with a fairly innocuous tweet from Dirk Shaw, “I am sorry but wordpress is hardly a web content management system.” that many of our CMS community waded into and included this post on CMS Myth arguing in favour and just about everyone arguing against… and crikey [...]

Last week I was proud to be voted onto the board at CM Pros, to join a pretty new board under the presidency of Scott Liewehr to take this respected community of practice organisation forward. It’s something we’ve been talking about for six months or so and  one look at the industry heavy weights that [...]

Open Text’s externally focused growth strategy.
Is it a CMS graveyard and how can you benefit from it?
(image by Jon)

I read an article yesterday from J.Boye and you should read it too, here.

Killing a product might make commercial sense for the vendor,
but customers are left to pay for the consequences
- J.Boye

Is it too late to wake up from the buyout fatigue?

RedDot CMS is alive and Open Text confirmed that they will continue their RedDot product line for the next couple of years. Still, there is not much buzz about OpenText’s leading enterprise CMS for the mid market these days. And the discussions about the buyout fatigue last year seem to be more than justified.
After the 2005 acquisition of RedDot Solutions by Hummingbird it was expected that things needed to settle in and development would take some time to gain traction. Another buyout 3 years later gave RedDot consultants and customers the impression to have stopped any momentum for innovation for almost 4 years.

RedDot CMS is still a leader in the ECM market

The CMS remains one of the leading ECM solutions on the market.
New modules and innovations were only available through Open Text partners and motivated RedDot CMS freelancers. Those were for a long time the only ones able to extend the core product functionality while the vendor appeared to be too busy planning new marketing strategies.
Until the release of version 10 not many new features were introduced by Open Text.

History repeats itself – Obtree to be replaced by RedDot CMS to be re.. – hold on – again?

Obtree is another acquisition victim of Open Text and was meant to be replaced by RedDot. Rumor has it that RedDot CMS will be replaced or merged with Vignette.
Now imagine a customers IT manager or marketing director having to explain why they had to move on from Obtree to RedDot CMS and now have to face something completely new again.. Cruel much? Yes. Indeed.
Even in a far future merging those two product lines is not feasible or will end in a disaster as Jon Marks pointed out last year.

RedDot can’t be replaced with anything within Open Text’s portfolio. And it doesn’t have to!

The Marketing 2.0 people at OpenText just seem to be looking at the Executive Summary and the theoretical revenue in Sales for Vignette as an option to replace / crossgrade from RedDot CMS. This is not feasible, not just technically. It is also guaranteed that customers and partners will be jaded and/or run away. How is that for revenue? Exactly. Bad.

Can Vignette maybe replace RedDot CMS?
Read more »

Share and Enjoy:

The perennial “what is a CMS” debate broke out this week, with a fairly innocuous tweet from Dirk Shaw, “I am sorry but wordpress is hardly a web content management system.” that many of our CMS community waded into and included this post on CMS Myth arguing in favour and just about everyone arguing against… and crikey [...]