Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware has been awarded a 2010 Bossie award (Best of Open Source Software) by InfoWorld, in the Applications category. InfoWorld’s Best of Open Source Software Awards (aka the Bossies) is chosen annually by Test Center editors and reviewers, and recognize the best open source software for business users.

The editors called Tiki “a powerful, integrated, Web-based application” that can “build and maintain websites, wikis, groupware, CMSes, forums, blogs, and bug trackers, as well as make them multilingual.”

The review continues, citing Tiki’s “fine-grained role-based privilege system” as a differentiating factor against classic wiki models, such as MediaWiki. Read the full article on InfoWorld.a: http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source/b… .

And don’t forget to nominate Tiki for the Packt 2010 Open Source Awards  (http://info.tikiwiki.org/article105).

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The IT Channel Planet reports
that Gartner has predicted SaaS revenue
within enterprise application software market will jump up 14 percent over
2009, based on convergence with cloud computing models and diminished security
and availability concerns among business customers. I heard about this through
George Dearing on Twitter.

Three of the growth markets are project
and portfolio management (PPM), content, communications and collaboration
(CCC), and customer relationship management (CRM). These are all areas I continue
to cover on this blog and the AppGap as they are key aspects of enterprise 2.0.
It is encouraging to see these numbers,

It is interesting to note that the
collaboration market exhibits the most noticeably disproportionate SaaS
adoption rates range from 4 percent for enterprise content management to 82
percent for web conferencing. However, I have seen that most collaboration platform
vendors are offering a SaaS option. I think this will continue to grow. 

Humans have hunted from the earliest times. Maybe that’s why we often accept the burdensome quest for information. We’re accustomed to the chase—even fooled into thinking we’re doing something valuable. Yet time lost in pointless pursuit means something is sacrificed. In the case of college enrollment, a drawn-out chase can mean losing top candidates to other institutions and ending up with a mediocre catch.

During peak season, enrollment office employees frenetically pursue information and answers, compiling scattered documentation in the hope of making quick, prudent decisions. Admissions, student aid, registrar, scholarship committees and other areas each have separate forms requiring distinctive information.

Yet as each department collects what it needs, useful information that could be shared is often requested again…and again. Information that could move decisions forward sits idle, garnering little or no attention.

Regrettably, as processes are deferred, institutions risk losing top candidates to other institutions.

Make informed decisions, quickly

Whether we’re considering undergraduate or graduate admissions, student financial aid, scholarship applications, or faculty search, the overriding goal is to garner and retain top people. Even though roles and responsibilities differ among departments, most draw vital information from transcripts, applications, test scores, essays, and references. Often, specific data found on forms is valuable in multiple places. Unfortunately, departmental software systems that store this precious information create data silos, resulting in information that is unknowingly collected multiple times for varying purposes.

Gathering information several times—even if it’s done efficiently—wastes resources, results in redundancy, generates errors, and causes delays.

Why not re-use your information to satisfy current needs and anticipate what lies ahead? Enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) software, integrated meaningfully with your business systems, redefine efficiency. By centralizing and securing access to content, then pushing and pulling information wherever it’s needed according to your pre-set business rules, ECM and BPM free your staff to work efficiently and focus on the services for which they were hired.

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Warning: Information Overload bots at work?

Information Overload is often thought of as an annoyance and a productivity killer – but there are far more nefarious aspects to it, such as spreading disinformation that misleads competitors, which can in turn disrupt markets.

Alexis Madrigal, writing in the Atlantic, reported that Jeffrey Donovan, a software engineer at Nanex, a data services firm, uncovered the activity of trading bots in electronic stock exchanges that send thousands of orders a second. The orders have buy and sell prices that are not near to market prices, meaning they would not ever be part of a real trade. The activities of these bots are not noticeable unless viewed on an extremely small time scale, in this case just milliseconds.

Donovan noticed the strange activity when looking for causes of the May 2 “Flash Crash” in the Dow, when it plunged nearly 1,000 points over a few minutes. He managed to plot the activity, and found distinct patterns emerge. The patterns show that the bots are making these extremely quick and non-serious orders (meaning with no intention of buying or selling anything) at almost all times.

Donovan’s theory, although not universally supported, is that rival trading companies could use the bots to introduce noise into the market, and use the delay caused by the noise to gain a millisecond advantage in trading, which in high frequency trading, may be significant.

There are other theories to explain the activity, including that the bots are actually real trading algorithms being tested, that they are a financial radar that is probing the market, and even that they are an emergent AI of sorts. Ultimately, no one really seems to know what the bots are doing or whom they belong to.

Regardless of the motives of these mysterious bots, they raise the specter of using Information Overload as a weapon, whereby you distract your competitor with information noise.

It is possible that the introduction of these orders on a timescale small enough in order to avoid detection may have played a part in the May 2 crash, and may play a role in future crashes. However, Madrigal notes in his article that, although Donovan believes that this kind of bot activity may have been a factor on May 2, he also stresses that there were many other variables, making assigning blame next to impossible.

Can Information Overload be used as a disruptive tactic? The answer is, of course it can. As we introduce more and more information into our lives, the potential to spread misinformation and to game the systems that filter and manage that information grows exponentially.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

So I promised an ECM specific follow-up to my book review on Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma.  There is a lot to talk about, so I’m not going to blather on with a long intro (though this sentence seems to be compounding the issue) and get right to it.

Or not…I have some disclaimers/notes:

• Going to try and use as much of Chistensen’s terminlogy as possible.  This isn’t to say that he has a perfect model, or even 80% model, of what is happening.  It just helps to keep the terminology consistent during this particular post.
• Every Content Management company is different and the observations will not apply universally.  Every company reacts differently.  That said, if I didn’t think that this applied to a large number of vendors, I would have targeted this post at particular vendors.

NOW we can get started.

Why Disruption Now?

There are several trains of thought out there that this dilemma doesn’t really apply to the Internet age because we are in a constant state of disruption.  This an important observation, so let me address this first.

The initial disruption was the Internet.  Since then, everything has mostly been a continuation of that disruption.  Much of the chaos has been sustaining technology for the original disruption.

Everyone agrees that the web impacted the Content Management industry strongly.  Stellant (now Oracle), Interwoven (now part of Open Text), and Vignette (now consumed by Autonomy)all came from the WCM space.  When you look at it though, it was just a new content problem.  Sustaining innovative technologies.  Unique needs, but no more so than Records Management, Imaging, or Digital Asset Management.

So what is qualifying as disruptive to Content Management these days?  Content Management itself has been disrupting the offsite paper record storage and microfiche industry, but what is actually disrupting the disruptor?  The Internet and the browser didn’t do it directly, but it became a sustaining technology for ECM.  The browser interfaces enhanced adoption over time for the existing vendors.  Definitely not disruptive.

Well, Content Management is being disrupted from a couple of directions:

• SharePoint: It isn’t SharePoint, but what it represents, basic Content Management for the masses.  It may not be the most functional, or scale to handle any situation, but it is easy to buy, install, and integrate into the most used productivity application suite, Office.
• The Cloud: Many SaaS Content Management offering cannot currently compete on functionality with the established ECM bigwigs, but that is just a matter of time.  They are established, have found a starting market, and are adding functionality.  As SharePoint demonstrated, they don’t need to match the established solutions to eat into the market share, they just need to hit the minimum requirement level, document sharing.

Open Source isn’t on the list because that is a model for solving problems, but not truly disruptive.   It is a just a different business model and not a sustaining technology.  For many, it boils down to appealing to people’s inner nature and a different pricing structure.  This is a gross over-generalization, but so is this entire post.

The Cloud could be called just a different pricing structure, but it is also a different delivery model. It is disruptive because no matter what the established vendors say, their software has not been architected for that environment, so it is not plug-and-play.

Those are the disruptions.  They are fundamental shifts in how Content Management is delivered.  They are shifts towards Content Management becoming more of a commodity (though we aren’t there yet).

Microsoft’s Attack

Okay, you can argue that they are disruptive at all or that they will just become a “sustaining technology” down the road.  If the latter is the case, most of the established vendors will survive. (Acquisitions and consolidation aside, we are talking about the actual software offerings).

When SharePoint arrived in the 2003 timeframe, it was nice, quaint, and not nearly functional enough to really have a significant impact on the Content Management market.  It wasn’t until the advent of the 2007 edition that it became an issue.

The initial response was pretty consistent, “Yeah, it does that, but it will fall apart under any real work.”  Well, the market didn’t care.  A large number of people didn’t, and still don’t, need the complicated solutions offered by the established vendors.

Over time, as SharePoint started to erode sales, the vendor strategy shifted to enhancing SharePoint.  This was fine and it started to drive sales, but SharePoint hasn’t stopped evolving.  In 2010 is has the ability to store content outside of the database, manages data better, scales better, and has better Records Management.  The need for SharePoint additional Content Management style capabilities is shifting towards archiving and governance.

When you look at this even more closely, it isn’t that SharePoint is a disruptive technology as much as it is a disruptive new vendor in the existing landscape.  So while SharePoint is very disruptive in its nature, it isn’t a “disruptive technology” as discussed by Christensen.

Still, ignore at your own risk.

The All-Encompassing Fog of the Cloud

Meanwhile, in the bushes, the cloud-based SaaS offering are lurking, ready to pounce.  They have realized a few important things:

• Not only do many people not need all of the functionality provided by the Content Management vendors, they don’t want to manage the data center either.
• Users are getting used to a rapid pace of innovation from their increased exposure to the ever-evolving Internet.  The three year “big release” has become a detriment  from an user expectation perspective, not to mention the nightmare for the IT and Change Management personnel.  Lots of incremental changes are easier to deal with than huge massive changes.
• The ability to share content outside of an organization is becoming more important, and not easier.  If I still have to email that 10 MB presentation to business partners (copying my colleagues), that really cuts into some of the important selling points of ECM.

The SaaS vendors don’t have all the answers, yet.  They are still working on security and many of the CYA features that your average CIO wants.  The thing is, those requirements are well defined, so it is just a matter of addressing them.  Research is only needed to prioritize, not define.

When those gaps are addressed by the SaaS solutions, who will win the market?  Those that are ready from day one, or those that try and create/market their solution after the questions are answered?  There is more to being a solid cloud offering than fancy marketing and a feature list.  The processes and the business value that they support is different than from a traditional software vendor.  Running a successful, secure, reliable, scalable online service is not the same as writing a COTS software package.

The Reaction

Some of the established vendors may tell you that their clients aren’t asking for the Cloud at this time.  They are asking for better business solutions, like Case Management.  Existing clients are asking for Case Management.  I’ve heard it.  The thing is that people that I talk to who are looking for new Content Management solutions are seriously considering cloud-based solutions.

How consistently are they asking? Well, in 2009 I was helping a large, 50K+ user, organization look at vendors, and they invited a SaaS provider to present their solution.  I knew going in that the vendors didn’t meet all the critical requirements, and I even told the client as much.  Didn’t matter.  They want to move in that direction as part of an overall strategy, so they were going to talk to the vendor about what the vendor offered and tell that vendor what was lacking for them to make a purchase.

Did the lack of a cloud-based solution get mentioned to the other Content Management vendors?  No.  The closest was when someone asked about external hosting and they mentioned that they had partners that can offer that service.  A savvy market research person would be able to see that question that as a potential need for cloud-based solutions, but a sales person, even if they are smart, don’t have the same channels.

But I digress and this post is already pretty long.

So the Content Management vendors, looking for double-digit growth, are pushing Case Management so they can land the multi-million dollar deals required for that growth.  Smaller cloud-based vendors don’t need to close deals of that magnitude to have double-digit growth in a quarter, much less a year.  The ECM vendors are chasing the large deals while the smaller deals get left to SaaS and SharePoint.

Christensen talks about this as companies moving up-market while the new vendors, based upon the disruptive technologies, tackle the lower market.  As the the firms innovate faster than the needs of the average customer, they can move up-market and take revenue from the established vendors.

So right now, SaaS vendors are doing this in the Content Management space.  They aren’t able to compete on functionality yet, but they are adding it faster than the market is demanding new features.  It is only a matter of time before they hit the minimum level needed for them to be a player.

There is Not Plenty of Time

As I discussed in the review, there are a ton of examples focused on the hard drive industry.  I think a more relevant example is the excavator industry.

In the first half of the 20th century, cable-actuated excavators ruled the construction world.  Each new model could scoop more thanks to larger buckets and deposit it further away.  The market drivers were bucket size and reach.

Then came the hydraulic excavators.  Made by new companies, these had smaller buckets and a smaller reach.  They couldn’t compete against the established cable-actuated vendors, but they worked well for people needing to dig precise trenches and other smaller tasks.

Over time, years and years, the bucket size and reach grew to the point that the larger construction project started to buy them.  While they could not in any way out-perform the cable-actuated excavators, they were more reliable, cost less per unit (though not less per cubic ft. bucket size), and were generally cheaper to operate.

By the end of the transition, which took decades, of the over 40 cable-actuated excavator vendors, only FOUR successfully transitioned to survive in the new market.  That is less than 10%.  Let me repeat a key fact here…

DECADES!!!

The technology was there and it was obvious.  Many established vendors entered the market once it was a viable solution for their clients, but by then it was too late.

Why didn’t they enter sooner?  Like many victims of disruptive technology, the margins were less on the new technology, which led to different processes within the makers of the disruptive tech.

Let me put it this way.  Let’s assume that I have historically made a 20% margin on my products.  I get two proposals.  One is for an innovative enhancement on an existing product that will increase sales 10-20% at the current margin.  The other is for a newly engineered solution that will increase sales around 5% at a 10% margin.  With finite resources hich do I approve?

It doesn’t matter if in 5-10 years that the second option will over-take the market, stockholders want results this year, and CEOs want their job next year.  The new markets for the disruptive tech are always fuzzy and ill defined.

This is why startups are the “source” of truly disruptive technology.  They can start with new business structures, values, and processes, that can take advantage of the different margins.  They also get more excited about that $50K deal.

Do you think EMC, Oracle, IBM, or Open Text get exited about $50K deals?

Where Does that Leave Implementers?

In reality, waiting for another post.  Let’s just say life can be good and move on to the wrap-up…

Is Pie Nuts?

While an in-depth study would be required to answer that question, not to mention my forced participation, I’m really talking about selling out to the concept.

Did I read the book, proclaim it as genius, and then seek to fit the world into the model proposed by Christensen?  Not at all.

I’ve been seeing this for a while.  Then this past Spring, I was talking about my observations about what I was seeing in the industry with some others and I was asked if I had read a couple of books.  One was Christensen’s book.  A month later, we were talking again and the book came up a second time, so I went and bought it to read.

What the book did was make me realize that what was happening was actually normal.  This happens in lots of different industries.  It is just harder to determine what qualifies as a disruptive technology in the IT field.  As computers disrupted microfiche in Content Management, the Internet is giving birth to the cloud, which is beginning to disrupt traditional data-center-based enterprise apps, like Content Management.

The best thing is that I realized that this isn’t happening because there are bad executives or managers at the established Content Management vendors, but because of the opposite.  Back to that hypothetical investment question.  What good manager would pick the investment that will increase sales by double digits?

In many ways, the established vendors are trapped by their own success.  There are ways out, but there is no set formula, I may not have the right answers, and I’ve rambled enough for now.  More later.

Flame on….

By Tony Mobily, Editor-in-Chief, Free Software Magazine

Tony Mobily

I am typing this as I am finally connected in shell to my Android phone. The prompt reminds me that it’s based on the Linux kernel (it’s free), the Dalvik virtual machine (it’s free), and free libraries. Millions of Android devices are shipped every day, each one is a Linux system. Today, it’s a phone. Soon, it will be tablets: Android 3.0 (coming out at the end of the year) will finally be very suitable for tablets. Apple alone will have to face fierce competition on pretty much every front. Microsoft… who? They are more irrelevant every day. I should be happy, right? Well, sort of. Looking back at how long it took me to get this shell prompt makes me worried. Very worried. We are heading towards a world where we no longer own the hardware we buy — and there is no point in having free software if you can’t own your hardware.

Upgrading my Hero

HTC Hero

This is the long story. In August last year (2009) I bought my HTC Hero. Mind you, I bought it. I didn’t get it with a lock-in carrier plan — I own this little white box, including its funny chin added by engineers who probably drank too much. When I bought it, it came with two things: Android 1.6, and a promise from HTC that the update for Android 2.1 would come out “soon”. Just to be exact, my HTC was the “Telus” version — I paid $100 more for it, because it works on Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) at 850Mhz, which happens to be the insane, non-standard frequency that ex-monopolist Telstra uses for its 3G data plan.

HTC has historically made smartphones based on Windows Mobile. In order to turn Windows Mobile from a bad joke to something that is actually usable, HTC developed Sense. Sense can be summed up as a bunch of custom modifications to the phone’s user interface. When HTC got their hands on Android, they must have had two pretty scary thoughts: the first one was that Android by default came with a very good UI which didn’t need the kind of tweaking Windows Mobile needed. The second one was that they had to come up with something in order to give HTC some competitive advantage. So, they ported Sense to Android — which makes it a little bit sluggish, it’s totally not necessary, but it’s there and it does improve in several departments (the keyboard being one of them). This has some implications. The main one is that when a new version of the Android system comes out, HTC needs to apply Sense to the new version, test it, and make sure that it works. This takes a lot of time and effort. So, as a result, at this point the Telus HTC Hero still runs on Android 1.6. Yes, that’s incredible. HTC and Telus keep on telling customers that it’s not their fault, Telus hasn’t requested it, HTC hasn’t released it yet, and so on.

(And if you thought that Motorola would be any different, you are out of luck: they have Blur instead of Sense, and they are about as responsive as HTC in terms of upgrading their phones to Android 2.1).

So, here I was: I needed to update to Android 2.0 or 2.1, since I needed to share my Internet connection while travelling. And couldn’t. I will say it again: I couldn’t. The phone was like Fort Knox. I wasn’t “root” on my phone: I was a normal user. The only privilege I had, was that I could use it. I couldn’t boot from another operating system. I couldn’t see the file system. I couldn’t do and see anything other that what HTC decided I could do or see. The story goes on with me spending hours, and hours, and hours getting my phone “rooted”.

It went more or less like this:

• Format my SSD flash memory stick, edit it by hand and stick some black magic code at the very beginning of it. This is apparently so that the phone doesn’t complain if you downgrade its ROM.
• Downgrade my system to the previous version, which was vulnerable to an exploit that allowed people to become root. This was the hardest thing to do, and was possible thanks to the previous step.
• Install a program that changed the boot loader into something useful, by exploiting the bug in the ROM I installed.
• Install a new ROM — my own, finally.

Yes. That is right: I had to hack into my own computer/phone in order to do what I wanted to do with it.

So, where do you go?

I couldn’t tell you “don’t buy HTC”, for two reasons.

1. HTC phones are actually painfully good. My HTC Hero is way better than an iPhone, has a long battery life, great reception, its CPU is fast… yes, it’s a very good device.
2. From what I saw, pretty much every other phone maker is the same. They won’t let you access the boot loader, and — worse — they won’t release software upgrades for their phones because they want you to buy the next model, with the next version of the software.

The short-lived Nexus One Android-Powered Smart Phone From Google

[Note: Google recently stopped selling the Nexus One, which came “rooted” (meaning that you could easily install your version of Android on it as you like).]

Basically at this point when you buy an Android phone, you have to hope that the very keen Android-hacking community has come up with a way of hacking into your own phone — or you are royally stuck with whatever the phone came with.

So, right now if you buy a laptop and you want to run GNU/Linux on it, you have to worry about what piece of hardware won’t work on it (I have two laptops, on one the microphone and the fingerprint login won’t work, on the other one the external speakers won’t work). If you buy an Android phone, on the other hand, you have to hope that it’s actually possible to hack into it and install whatever you like on it.

(I am not an Android developer, but I think it’s possible to purchase a “Dev” device from HTC, which allows you to flash a ROM. However, that’s not good enough. You shouldn’t have to spend more money on a developers’ device on order to do whatever you like with a smart phone).

Free software becoming meaningless

Android is indeed free software. You can get it, download it, run it on an emulator, change it, redestribute it, etc. However, mobile phone makers are locking everything in, so that you can’t actually use this software in any useful way — unless you are willing to spend hours hacking your own device.

I am not sure people realize the gravity of this situation. It’s as if a company sold you a laptop with GNU/Linux preinstalled, but that hardware didn’t have any way to chose which device it will boot from, and you didn’t have the root password.

If you think “big deal”, think again.

For example, being simply a user you cannot:

• Share your internet connection
• Use your phone as an access point
• Use your phone for anything that might possibly displease your carrier
• Explore your own file system and see how things actually work

That last point might not affect many people, but the other ones definitely will. And I am sure there is plenty more.

My proposed solution

When I write articles like this, I always make sure that I have at least one suggested solution (otherwise I will end up sounding like a grumpy old man who doesn’t have anything useful to say). My solution is very simple: forcing hardware producers to sell their phones with a boot loader, in order to install your own custom ROM. This could be done in such a way so that if you do access your boot loader, you lose your warranty (although this would be insane). There could be a per-device password, or whatever way that will basically differentiate you from “common” users who don’t feel the need to actually own their own devices.

This should be done forcefully. This means that they shouldn’t have a choice. It should be done by law, or by contract (in the software license maybe?).

Otherwise, in the long term, we might end up having this great piece of software, and nowhere to run it. Now, that would be ironic.

[Note: "Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved and appropriate attribution information (author, original site, original URL) is included". The original article can be found here.]

Philadelphia is a city dominated by the memory of Benjamin Franklin. Statues, memorials, tourist stops – seemingly everything in town honors this notable Founding Father. (The rest? That’s reserved mostly for the Philly cheesesteak.)

At the UPenn Wharton UI Conference I attended in late July (Big Ben founded UPenn, too) Franklin spoke from the hereafter to educate and enlighten on the topic of web content management.

In a great presentation about how colleges and universities deal (often perilously) with web content management, Jen Yuan of UPenn invoked some of Franklin’s most notable quotes to illustrate salient points. (In an earlier post, I reference her research that found approximately 20 CMS systems are used at Penn.)

I’ve highlighted a number of the great CMS-centric Franklin-isms below and Yuan’s deftly crafted points – applicable to non-EDUs as well.

“Haste makes waste.”

It appears Franklin foreshadowed one of the biggest and most common web content management mistakes –rushing into CMS projects. If we’ve learned anything here at the CMS Myth, it’s that acting too quickly leads to trouble. Yuan notes: schools may be good at creating spec sheets and technical requirements for a CMS, but end up trying to hustle through CMS projects to achieve their objectives. This shows up in several ways:

• Because budgets are always an issue, schools make hasty CMS decisions to implement to get a quick payback in terms of reducing the number of people and time required to manage and publish content and sites.
• EDU web committees and individual stakeholders (let’s call them Big Thinkers) often believe their expertise in one discipline – say, physics  – gives them license to work fast to conquer anything, including this whole CMS thing. A common sentiment: “It can’t be rocket science; I should know, I am a rocket scientist!”
• Colleges and universities, in the move to implement, typically don’t spend enough time defining their complex organizational structures and hierarchies and prepare them to work together for web CMS success.

To avoid “Haste makes waste” problems, ask and answer critical questions: Does implementing a new CMS make sense right now? How much work, at what cost, in what timeframe will this all take? How long will we use the CMS? What’s the CMS lifecycle, and how long will it take to reap real benefits?

Further questions to explore: If we already have a CMS, does it make sense to keep our existing CMS or switch to another solution? Are we prepared to assemble an effective evaluation team with the time and fortitude to lead an enlightened product review and selection?

And finally this important question: Do we have sufficient organizational support at the highest levels to get buy in to get the time, money and organizational commitment required to do CMS right?

“Half the truth is often a great lie.”

Ben was a great philosopher. And with those eight words above, he nails one of the most overlooked factors in CMS adoption. Namely: what will the ongoing maintenance costs add up to, and are you ready to support them?

As Yuan pointed out as comparison, making a baby and raising a child are far different. Conducting CMS research, running RFPs and holding vendor interviews and demos help you identify a solution – and the winning vendor will love you for it. But remember to pay attention and factor in all the additional costs associated with buying into a CMS product – and ask your vendor to paint a full and complete picture of the costs. (Far be it from us to cast aspersions on CMS vendors.)

The lesson for you, CMS buyer: Look beyond initial software license costs, for one. That $100K software license for a commercial system will run you about 20% in annual maintenance costs, costing you another $100K over a five year period. Of course, that’s a fraction of what you’ll end up spending when you add up time, agencies, internal resources, upkeep and other expenses.

Other great chestnuts attributed to Franklin and applicable to CMS and the web:

“Distrust and caution are the parents of security.”

The bottom line: DON’T underestimate security requirements for your CMS and web properties. Schools frequently fail to allocate proper security resources, Yuan notes. If anything, go the extra mile during the planning stages to align and allocate the people, process and policies to ensure bulletproof security (especially a college and university culture dominated by independence, diversity of CMS use, dozens or hundreds of authors and a “do it myself” attitude) .

“He that teaches himself hath a fool for a master.”

Translation: Properly address your organization’s training requirements when adopting CMS. Don’t gloss over the needs of your users. Starting out with a new CMS is hard on the people tasked with using it. Software products tend to be geared toward engineers and developers; CMS vendors still have a long way to go to make their products easy to use. Low levels of user satisfaction means low user confidence levels and failure of adoption; robust training can breed familiarity and confidence and overcome some of these problems.

“There are no gains without pains.”

Ben must have had the CMS Myth on his mind when he spoke those words. We like to say CMS is not a silver bullet. No pain, no gain? We agree with that. Organizations need to realize content management is an ongoing process involving people, process and content. CMS can bring a world of positive change, but change is ongoing with CMS. And it can be painful when you introduce a new CMS to the organization.  So be innovative. Rethink your business processes, workflow and rules – embrace the opportunity for change and digital improvement that a CMS can support. Be prepared. Start early and anticipate ongoing needs for maintenance, support and preventative care for your CMS and sites.  And budget for it – now.

Related posts:

1. How many CMS systems in YOUR organization?
2. Should you throw out the CMS or just the implementation?
3. What can three wise web monkeys teach us about CMS?

Web content management software vendors are constantly working to differentiate themselves in the crowded marketplace. For buyers, one of the less helpful ways is when they introduce new terms to replace existing ones. At the moment the current buzzword is “experience management”. Does this mean you now need to convince management about yet another term?

No, experience management is really just new marketing talk by proprietary and expensive vendors for a content management system. Experience management  has been mentioned on and off for the past decade or so and is currently pushed strongly by several CMS vendors such as Day (soon Adobe), FatWire, Sitecore and Vignette (now Open Text). The problem with experience management, sometimes called web experience management or customer experience management, is that it really just describes the standard requirements for a system to power a website in 2010.

Experience management certainly describes nothing that you should not be able to expect from a Web CMS. Different vendors have put different angles on the buzzword, but I’ve yet to see a buyer who had a budget specifically for experience management or have issued a request for proposal for an experience management system. User experience covers most of it and is an established field and a recognized industry term, so why not use that instead?

A recent example of how the term has been used is from the Adobe acquisition of Day to quote Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Enterprise Solutions, Adobe:

Adobe’s acquisition of Day represents a key milestone in our efforts toward delivering best-in-class customer experience management solutions to enterprises and governments worldwide

In an industry plagued by too many failed projects, we don’t need new confusing terms to replace ones we already have. Every so often a discussion occurs among industry pundits around whether we need to change terms, mostly in attempts to get senior management to realize what they are missing out on. A recent example: It was suggested in 2009 to deprecate the term “intranet” as it carried to much “dead weight” . Terms such as personalisation and portal have also been hot or declared dead from time to time.

To my surprise, the term web experience management has actually made it onto Wikipedia. A quick look at the history page, reveals that the page was created by a FatWire employee. Perhaps no surprise, that the references on the page link to FatWire articles on the AIIM and KM World sites. Also, a search on Google for web experience management brings up Vignette, FatWire and Sitecore right after the Wikipedia page.

Vendors will always be pushing their own agenda and not necessarily in a language you understand. If you as a customer want to fix web content management, ask your vendor to use terms that you understand and generally focus more on executing projects and delivering quality software and less on coming up with new marketing terms.

As always, let me know if you agree or disagree. You can also add a comment on the “experience management” Wikipedia page, which I think has more industry impact and many more readers than this blog.

The Tiki Community Software Association is proud to announce the 5.1 release of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. This latest release includes many fixes, tweaks, and updates, including several new and improved features:

• * Improved compatibility for Microsoft Windows and IIS
• * Fixed the Since Last Visit module
• * Better support for UTF-8
• Review the Tiki 5.1 Release Notes (http://tikiwiki.org/ReleaseNotes5.1) and change log for complete information.

More than a dozen members of the Tiki Community have contributed over 140 updates to this release. All Tiki admins are encouraged to upgrade their sites to this latest release. See http://info.tikiwiki.org/Download for information on how to download this release.

Tiki 6 on the Horizon

Meanwhile, Tiki developers are hard at work on Tiki 6: the next generation of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. The Tiki Community made great strides forward during the recent TikiFest in Barcelona. Early adopters can obtain the pre-release Tiki 6 from http://info.tikiwiki.org/Download for testing or to explore the new features in Tiki 6.

For details on Tiki 6, planned for release in October 2010, see http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Tiki6. Tiki 6 will succeed Tiki 3 as the Long Term Support (LTS) version.

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