Jon Marks (@mcboof) has set a challenge to vendors on his blog – to prioritize various elements of what makes a great CMS product, to choose between Editors, Performance, Features, Developers and producing Websites. I know, I’m not a vendor any more - but I started writing a comment and once it got longer than his original post, I thought hang on…

Here’s the challenge from Jon’s post:

So, here is the deal. I challenge any CMS vendor to rate these in order of priority:

• Editors – A user interface that is a editor or publisher’s wet dream
• Performance – The fastest, most stable and scalable CMS in the world
• Features – The richest set of features any CMS could dream of offering
• Developers – An open, standard, extensible product that makes developers salivate
• Website – A product that can give you a kick-ass website, really really quickly

I recommend that you can read the rest of his post and the comments, as he invites CMS vendors to both naval gaze and offer up which one of these children is their favourite.

My take – I guess it goes without saying that in every R&D project office, of every vendor and for every open source developer – this argument is or should be happening – it was certainly my experience – but the frustration is that with a finite developer resource you end up with a compromise.

Compromise is a bad word and here and on Jon’s blog – we have the luxury of donning our smoking jackets, filling our pipes and pontificating on what’s right and proper and not have to deal with the grubby commercial realities. The truth of course is that a vendor has to prioritize based on return on that R&D investment.

But, let’s not let that stop us!

So, looking at the comments on Jon’s post as I write this – two experienced CMS practitioners, Philipe Parker and Zahoor Hussain both sat firmly on the fence, with a view that is was down to the project.

I think Philippe and Zahoor are right – client engagements vary and of course some clients need more of one thing than another, but I think what Jon is driving at is to look at this issue through a vendors eyes of building a single product.

But – is this a single product for a single market?

If my CMS is aimed squarely at the Mom and Pop store market, it would be wasted R&D effort to focus on performance or features, in fact if I focused my effort on the ‘kick-ass website’ creator requirement – I may not even need to offer much up to developers.

This hints at an issue in our market – bit like the WordPress debate… broad church.. big undefined market.. etc etc.. It’s also worth noting that Jon refers to a website, so you hear a collective sigh as the CMS crowd mutter – ‘a CMS is not just WCM’…  (a respectful nod to you folks, but I digress..).

Anyway, lets try and play the game – prioritize..

I agree with Adrian Mateljan, who in his comment defines performance to include stability and reliability.

I don’t think that every CMS should be efficient enough to run every News International website on a rusty old 486 under Rupert Murdoch’s desk – but having something that is there when the visitor or content author have the good grace to turn up has to be #1.

The problem with performance, for a CMS buyer is it is such a complex intangible, with a variety of factors at play – and for vendors, once you’ve got the basics right, squeezing out the extra horsepower is a difficult internal investment sell vs the sexy stuff that helps the product in a demo.

Also today, ‘throwing tin at it’ seems to be an economically viable scalability option for some – I was talking to someone involved in a serious government website project – using a large rollout of a LAMP stack open source product – who was scaling horizontally quickly and cheaply, cloning extra machines and replicating databases. And it was really, really working for them.

So, yes having a reliable platform is priority #1. After that, it gets hazy for me.

Starting with Developers – would seem to be a stuck on, no brainer #2 – right?

A WCM project is no longer ‘crank the handle and spit out a brochure’ – it’s build me a web engagement or experience platform, it’s integrate to social media, it’s show people my back office, it’s mobile apps, it’s marketing platforms, analytics, lead generation etc etc..

The problem for the buyer is that it’s a blessing and a curse, a good developer platform offers great opportunity, but can mask some of the missing ‘out of the box’ must haves for editors as well as product features.

The good news is if a pretty boy pre-sales hacker can build something that fits your scenario overnight, imagine what your crew can do with it in production? The bad news is the hangover of supporting and maintaining the bespoke work.

It is of course a trade off – in a previous life I saw a straightforward, but large government project turn to a behemoth as a systems integrator cut out the ‘out of the box’ vendor functionality (to the point that the software was a tiny bit of the solution) for something beautifully bespoke – but in the process turned themselves into a software developer with all of that maintenance and support responsibility shared by just one client. Bad news for the client as the budget ballooned.

I’ve also seen a client case study presented at an industry event, where the vendor and implementation partner (and presumably the client) were buoyant about a project that was based clearly on a developer platform CMS, the slides spoke of the thousands of lines of code and man years it took to implement – but, it’s a successful project.
There’s a balance here somewhere, can you build and support what you need more efficiently than taking the out of the box, possibly compromised feature?

Yes ‘possibly compromised’ – it’s hell for vendors to build broad adoption into a feature (rather than offering an API and saying get on with it) it means making decisions for the hypothetical customer. Those decisions are hard, the edge cases you need to build to, the current customers you need to satisfy, the future proofing, the support.. etc. This sometimes means that it might not fit your requirement exactly.

Take the example of Jon’s requirement “kick ass websites, really, really quickly”:

Vendor A has the sexiest website cookie cutter you have ever seen, hell even YOUR marketers could work it (but the geeks suspect some back end ugliness there somewhere) . Vendor B has the API that would allow you to roll-out your websites, your way (eventually). Which do you choose? Do you, take the big red D pill or is it a cocktail of E, F and W?

I also think there is a great discussion point here about the crew you have on-board, a debate Jon has championed himself. You want to be innovative and engaging – it’s not going to just come out of the vendors box, a well marshalled set of great, creative developers could be your projects rock stars – differentiating your business.

With my background, I have to talk about the E – Editors. As I’ve written previously, nothing is going to starve to death your beautiful website like a lack of content. Or shackle your progress to engagement nirvana if people are still emailing you press releases to post. But, without P or possibly D – where are you going to post to?

As I said at the outset, it is a compromise – I’d suggest that vendors really want to please everyone – but they have a certain skill set, inspiration, experience, set of customers or whetever that gives them strengths and weaknesses – and buyers need to match those with their requirements.

It would be nice if we could marshal this unruly market into buyer shaped niches, where short lists pick themselves. But, in the meantime in a procurement (boring old advice I know) it’s important that buyers get advice, look at reference sites, carry out POC’s, talk to an implementation partner that understand and have done this kind of thing  before.

Your choice, your compromise? What do you think?

I think we can safely say that the last two week have been quite lively for Alterian Content Manager, as after an incubation with partners, customers and analysts we took our product strategy and roadmap to the social web. I’ve tweeted, interviewed, commented, posted and now (finally) blogged our message to the CMS community – I say “we took” but @janusboye certainly had a hand in igniting it.

Alright, I admit we didn’t quite plan it this way – but that’s the lesson of the new social media powered PR – you can’t always control it and it’s often a test of reactions – of ensuring you have the right tools, people and message to do that.

In this post (as I tend to on this blog) I’ll be focusing on my experience – you can read our official news release on Alterian Content Manager 7, it’ll give you some background as what I am going to ramble on about here.

Anyway, Tuesday a rumour is going around, I get a couple of DM’s – and Janus mischievously tweets:

sources tell that Alterian will soon discontinue Immediacy / Alterian CM Corp. Edition – wondering if customers will enjoy the sunset

Ah… not entirely true, but now it’s out there – so strap yourselves in folks – you’re launching a product strategy on social media!

The vigilant Irina Guseva of CMSWire clearly had her ear to the ground and grabbed me for an exclusive interview and in no time at all (how does she do that so fast?)  published – Alterian Drops Immediacy, Morello Web CMS Brands.

In the meantime – and this demonstrates the diversity of this CMS community – there’s a CMS Haiku competition going on – Jon Marks (@mcboof) is offering free beer to the winners (yes folks, the stakes are raised, this isn’t about product marketing any more, it’s about beer) – he dares me to pitch in:

@iantruscott Now that @irina_guseva has broken the news (http://bit.ly/b8RQlO), can’t you re-break it in #cmshaikuform?

I quickly scan through the social media bibles; “Groundswell”, “Here Comes Everybody”, Jeremiah Owyang’s entire blog archive – no mention of haiku as a required skill of today’s social media marketer.

In truth, I admit, I did have to Google how exactly to write haiku – more on my first poetic foray later.

The next day starts with what we eventually agree was a Twitter interview (no doubt someone calls these “twinterviews”) by James Hoskins (@JamesHoskins) – long time social media agent provocateur – especially when it comes to all things CMS and Alterian.

Unfortunately it’s difficult to find this conversation, James and I didn’t hashtag it and twitter doesn’t lend itself to a Q & A structure, unless you want to read it backwards through replies – and I haven’t really got room for it all here. We have however ensured that the excellent points James has made are in our official communications.

This goes on all day and some of the next, with other folks now pitching in with questions – at the end, James pays me a huge compliment:

#followfriday @iantruscott - raising the bar for other WCM vendor VPs in openness and engagement #alterian

Meanwhile – Adriaan Bloem (@AdriaanBloem) of CMSWatch got in touch, for a quick briefing, we have a positive chat and he quickly knocks up this blog post – provocatively titled “Alterian Drops Immediacy” and written in the house style, of a father warning his daughters to watch out for those vendor types, with their high-falutin’ words and fancy charming ways – nothing wrong with that – but please read my (admittedly lengthy) comment response.

Crikey.. now I’ve got Philippe Parker (@proops) encouraging me to haiku.

@IanTruscottimpressed you can explain your strategy in #140 – now please do it as a #cmshaiku

So.. double dared… here goes.

C M C or E / Here me Alterian say / Autumn is Future

Which surprisingly made it to the short list and the community got to vote – it got a respectable 3rd, but no beer. (I could protest – the haiku rules I play by said it needed to include a season!).

So folks, that’s it. A few days in the life of product marketing via social media. It was fun – demonstrates that today marketing and PR is as much about listening and reacting as it is about planned strategies. It also sparked off a whole bunch of interesting conversations I’ve had with clients and partners since.

..and to whoever whispered that rumour in Janus Boye’s ear – I would genuinely like to thank you.

We have been executing a communication plan that started last year with our customer and partner events and we intend that the program will reach all of our customers and partners in the next few weeks. If you have questions about our strategy, then please contact me directly (ian.truscott@alterian.com), or your Alterian representative.

Related posts:

1. I Predict A (CMS) Riot: 1 hour, 6 People, 1 Wave, 1 Post
2. Blog Comments and Engagement
3. Back to blogging…

As part of preparation for a presentation he gave yesterday at Jboye ‘09 – a few days ago Jon Marks set a challenge to his Twitter community; to give him examples of where Web Content Management fails. I admit I am not at the JBoye event, so I have missed seeing Jon in action – [...]

I’m going to kick off 2010 with a blog post about Web Content Management, enough for now of my wittering on about my place in the social web or even web engagement.

Content is still king and as I catch up with three weeks or so of my RSS reader, it seems that at the end of last year – the decade – that there was a new CMS blogging trend and it’s for talking about trends, the CMS blogosphere was alive with predictions. All worthy of comment and I thought maybe I can chuck in some thoughts of my own.

For starters I’d better set some context, of what I think about our market historically, so you know where I stand.

Content Management has gone through various trends, casting my mind back, it was once believed that the CMS services (CMS only mean’t web publishing back then) would be commoditised down into the application server and that the application server in turn would be part of the operating system. We would then build content management and deliver applications (or portals) on this common back end – and of course this Java centric world view never came to pass.

Back then a CMS was an IT enabler and part of the infrastructure and that infrastructure grew to become managing all content and knowledge of an enterprise – an Enterprise Content Management System – it’s reach extending to Digital Asset Management, Document Management – the world became obsessed by compliance, records management and the vision moved from the geek to the librarian – of turning organisations into filing systems.

All very worthwhile, but in the meantime the budget and requirements pendulum swung toward the business – and marketing specifically – as they didn’t like the IT focus of these early CMS implementations, didn’t get the greater good of ECM and wanted to focus on the marketing problem at hand – a website they could own.

So, an agile, diverse, vibrant bunch of open source, small to mid-tier vendors rushed into the space the old titans of CMS (now ECM guys) had disconnected from. The focus was on ease of use, of rapid implementation, of appealing to this newly empowered business user and for some, their chums at the agency with easily accessible and cheap site building skills like PHP and ASP.NET.

And increasingly, through social media making people at ease with web publishing – a democratisation of content authoring.

Yes I know, I’ve simplistically crashed through quite a lot of history in a few crude paragraphs, but in a nutshell – we’ve gone from pleasing the geeks, then the librarians to it being all about the business user, the marketer or the communicator.

This broad band of website building offerings, delivery models and tools that enable real people to add pages to a website, from a range of vendors – the ECM leviathans to open source projects – came to be known as WCM. And it is a broad church of technologies, best practice, capabilities (from a blog, a brochureware site to a multi-national roll out of hundreds of personalised sites) and of course prices.

To some a WCM is nothing more than a PHP UI on a database, or maybe it’s a web delivery infrastructure and to others its an intelligent purveyor of well understood personalised content to the discerning, well understood visitor – its hard to tell what’s out of the box and what’s down down to the skill of the crew that builds with it.

Which brings me back to my trend topic and the predictions - this nebulous haze of requirements, product and solution capability has attracted a fair amount of comment, as my fellow bloggers swish around the tea leaves for what’s next.

The general view is that WCM – the acronym, the definition of this as a software space is up for debate and that maybe 2010 is the year we see some changes.

Barb Mosher in Emerging Trends in Web Content Management over at CMSWire says:

we really need to think less about WCM as the only way to categorize a product/solution/platform and start thinking tag lines like “Web Publishing Framework”, “Integrated Online Marketing”, “Content Creation and Management”. Are we caught up in trying to define a market that is changing so rapidly that it really defies definition?

Laurence Hart (@piewords) also touches on this, in his Predictions for 2010 post:

Constantly Hyping Acronyms Of Systems: WCM is suffering. It doesn’t really cover mobile platforms well and there are big differences in the presentation and the management of the landscape.

Enterprise Content Management and WCM will go their separate ways. Okay, that isn’t going to happen, but it NEEDS to happen. Why? Because it is distracting them from their core, which is the platform and their core applications.

This last comment was inspired by the CMSWatch predictions, one of which being that Document Management and ECM will go their separate ways (so if ECM and WCM are splitting, who’s left at the ECM party?). CMSWatch also inspired a typically entertaining post from Jon Marks – in which he says:

Enterprise Content Management is well defined. The term WCM is horseshit, unnecessary and should take a long walk off a short pier….. I can already see the news headlines: LONDON, 2009 – SHOCK HORROR! WCM Geek Demands Death of term WCM. But it’s true. I’m of the camp that wished the term WCM would cease to exist.

Jon then goes onto de-construct WCM into its constituent parts, with an underlying content infrastructure layer with common standards (CMIS/JCR), separated from a delivery framework.

His post inspired Seth Gottlieb at Content Here, who agrees, wondering if we should go back to calling it CM  - you should also check out Peter Monks and The Case for Killing “WCM”, inspired by Jon (and he nicely puts how we WCM folks feel about Jon calling us losers!). Then, if you haven’t had your WCM predictions fill, then I’d also suggest a look at this from Peter Monks on his shiny new personal blog.

I am not sure how one goes about creating the tipping point that defines a new software segments or niche, how do we get customers asking for one of these new website-publishing-but-not-WCM-doohickies?

Clearly the analysts are key to this, CMSWatch had a stab at realigning their tiers and I think that’s definitely work in progress and needs at least a bit more explanation, Gartner have got back into WCM after a long absence of ECM focus and Forrester have long observed WCM as part of the marketing platform mix. But – I am sure that CMSWire, Jon, Peter, Seth, Barb and Lawrence have more influence than they admit, so perhaps it could be the year of the death of the definition of WCM as we know it today.

OK, so I had better venture my own predictions, it would be rude not having had a look at what these folks have had to say.

Personally, I think whatever we call it – we’ve had the era of IT, the librarian and the business user/marketer – and whilst clearly all of these folks should be catered for in the WCM of 2010 – I think it’s the era of the audience, our community, citizens or customers – the visitor.

Yes folks, it’s web engagement – sorry, did I say I wan’t going to talk about that…?

Image of cystal ball published under Creative Commons License, courtesy of  Bitterjug

Related posts:

1. Alterian CMS Meme Response

As part of preparation for a presentation he gave yesterday at Jboye ‘09 - a few days ago Jon Marks set a challenge to his Twitter community; to give him examples of where Web Content Management fails. I admit I am not at the JBoye event, so I have missed seeing Jon in action – but as a blogger on this sort of thing, let alone as a WCM vendor it would be rude to ignore the wealth of great points this process threw up.

As Jon crowd sourced his presentation content, seemingly every element of a CMS procurement and project got a mention.

As Irina Guseva of CMSWire (who was at JBoye) points out in this post - the first point to consider is whether there is something that needs fixing?

Apparently at the conference – CMS Watch’s Jarrod Gingras was certain there’s nothing to fix and I have to agree. As a software genre it’s vibrant, there is a strong open source community and I reckon I could find a new vendor every week. I also discovered, meeting a new competitor at the last big Internet show I was at – there are VC’s out there still funding start ups (in Scandinavia!).

I have a small theory here (not about Scandinavia), but that in it’s most basic form a CMS is a database (or data store of some kind) with a user interface and a web application – it’s an accessible idea for developers (heck, I even built something in PHP for a personal website once) and this contributes to this diversity, despite the countless CMS options available – of folks continuing to build their own, in the shape of their own niche, geography or ‘unique’ requirements.

This leads me to the next observation made on Twitter, WCM or CMS is a broad church and many folks saw that terminology, the software classification as needing a fix – the fact that there was confusion initially on the hashtag, probably tells it’s own story as people moved from using #FixCMS to #FixWCM.

This discussion got more granular, the suggestion seemed to be that products and I guess their strengths and fit for niche should define them. Market niches have always been ‘crowd sourced’ as industry observers and analysts have defined them (not vendors) and the market adopts them, so it’ll be interesting if this idea gains any momentum.

There were very few suggestions of what we should call them, but it seems that this would provide more evidence that the industry being organised around tiers based around the size of the implementation (or budget) is flawed.

Talking of organizing the industry into tiers – analysts – they also got a few mentions.

What helps customers best; a simple magic quadrant or a weighty volume with detailed look at 41 vendors? Personally, I think this needs to be part of the mix, organisations should talk to the analysts about your own needs, analysts reports are written academically, independent of a real project.

As CMSWatch and Gartner got a nod in these discussions, I’ll mention Forrester, as I think their model serves customers well, they have a very transparent RFP like process, based around real life requirements (as they see them) and they score vendors against those and publish the scores – it irons out a bit of the analysts gut feel, emotion and how good a vendors marketing might be. It also gives someone trying to choose a vendor a matrix by which they can look at their own requirements and compare.

Hmm… matrix of requirements – could that form the new WCM niches?

Anyway, back to the subject at hand – requirements got more than a few mentions and the way organisations form them internally and present them during procurement.

RFP’s and sizing up a vendor for the job seemed to be the only thing that got a definitive agreement on – it’s about the organisations own requirements, not an IT wish list or a generic downloaded RFP  and these things should be presented as scenarios – with stakeholders and business owners.

I wholly agree with that, I would also suggest that if an organisations presents a well structured set of scenarios, requirements supported by business value, a clear objectives (and dare I say budget) – vendors will self determine if it’s for them or not. No vendor, agency or systems integrator wants to embark on the expensive process of bidding for business that they don’t fit, that they don’t feel they can win or enter into an unsatisfactory partnership.

Whilst much of the discussion was around the pre-sale, selection, procurement and the vendors offering. The implementation got a bit of focus, with some of the arguments getting some fresh debate – of whether a vendor should do the implementation, whether you should choose an implementation partner first, who should help an organisation choose a vendor and whether in fact the track record of the implementation folks was more important than the vendor.

I don’t think I agree with any of these exclusively, clearly the right combination of crew and technology is essential and partners provide a fabulously broad set of experience and skills that a web engagement project needs outside of the vendor software skills. Although I think vendors should maintain a professional services team, not to compete with implementation partners, but to provide subject matter expertise and a valuable direct connection between the product and it’s market.

There was also talk of pilots and proof of concepts, again from my point of view, an excellent opportunity for organisations to really get their requirements across and for the business partnership to be tested and forged.

So, what am I missing…? Oh yes… vendors.

It seems pricing complexity was the primary issue – I’d encourage folks to engage with their vendor on how they want to commercially partner with them – but it seems there are some complex models out there that are bending customers and their partners architectural choices to fit.

Thanks to Jon for being the catalyst of this discussion, I haven’t added links to everyone’s tweets as linking to all would render this post unreadable and I found it difficult to pull out one tweet over another – I would however urge you to check out the #fixwcm and #fixwcm hashtags on Twitter and the following posts:

• #jboye09 Web Content Management: Inconvenient Truths and Industry Challenges By Irina Guseva
• Let’s #fixwcm Before The Wheels Come Off by Jon Marks
• My JBoye09 Fix WCM Presentation by Jon Marks
• The World’s Worst WCMS by Seth Gottileb
• Rethink Content Management by Janus Boye

A long post, with lots of  stuff that hopefully I can mine in future posts,  but what do you think, what did I miss? Does WCM need fixing?

Image of workshop reproduced under Create Commons License courtesy of M J M

Related posts:

1. Alterian CMS Meme Response
2. Joining the Trend for WCM Trends

It was a lovely Friday morning/afternoon, and we were Waving. The experiment initiated by McBoof (yes, that one) brought together 6 CMS folks from around the world. The event gathered together analysts, journalists, vendors, system integrators to Wave on a topic that was decided at that very moment. We had one hour (in between conference calls and other job thingys) to pick a topic and Wave it.