CM Pros

We went from content silos to content management silos to enterprise silos. But by necessity, our need to share information is pushing us to collaborate beyond any arbitrary boundaries. What does this mean for our profession? By going to content management systems, are we just catching up with today, or preparing for tomorrow? Will Content 2.0 catch up to Web 2.0? Strategy A is bringing the first content management conference to Vancouver that covers content management from both the Web and XML structured authoring perspectives.

Looks like it could be an interesting conference.

The Forrester Wave for ECM Suites in 2007 is out, and like its rival the Gartner Magic Quadrant, it has listed IBM as the leader in Enterprise Content Management.

Not all M&A's are reason to celebrate. Sometimes they happen guns a-blazing. We get the feeling Oracle's attempt to acquire BEA Systems will be just that kind of socially awkward cold war-type thing. Last Wednesday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced that a future takeover bid for BEA Systems will be less than the US$ 7 billion it was willing to pay last month. He pointed to the stock price and coolly added, "Clearly the $17 price seems too high now." US$ 17 per share was the valuation of Oracle's initial takeover bid. But Ellison's comment is also an acknowledgment of the downturn in value for a number of tech stocks, which hit Oracle hard, according to the Financial Times. BEA's shares have enjoyed a safe plateau as its shareholders anticipate a fresh bid from Oracle. Last month Oracle's offer to buy BEA was rejected because it "undervalued the company." But Ellison remains grimly optimistic, adding at its recent SF-based annual financial analyst meeting, "It looks like no one [else] is going to buy BEA. We were the only buyer then."

Following in the vein of Tony Byrne's 10 Steps to a Successful Vendor Demo and my post on how to sit through one , here is a link to Joel Spolsky's How to Demo Software article. Besides being an entertaining read (as all Joel's posts are), I think this article re-enforces the importance of the performance and other production values to a vendor demo.

As readers of the SharePoint chapters of our Web CMS Report and Enterprise Search Report know, there are many good online and book-length resources about MOSS 2007 in general, but almost all of them treat the platform's WCM and Search services in a fairly cursory fashion. That's too bad, because those parts of MOSS are brand new and -- customers tell us -- frequently quite puzzling, even after wading through all the Microsoft documentation and webinars.

So I was pleased when Alan pointed me to this 4-day training course exclusively about Web Publishing in MOSS. "Publishing sites" in MOSS look and behave quite differently from your typical SharePoint team sites. This kind of training is, I think, long overdue in the marketplace...

The changes at WebTrends continue.

A Friday afternoon email from the company explained that CMO Tim Kopp would be leaving at the end of this year. This follows the Halloween Day exits of CEO Greg Drew and 3 other managers and promotion of ClickShift co-founders John Rodkin and Leo Chang to engineering and hosted operations management. They served as co-founders of ClickShift which was acquired by WebTrends in 2006, providing the foundation for the WebTrends Dynamic Search product.

How does this affect you if you're a WebTrends' customer? Let's consider 3 areas of potential concern:

• Technical Support: There's been a change of management for hosted services. WebTrends' has many licensed customers that it would like to move to the hosted services model. If you are a licensed customer, I suggest you speak to your account manager regularly to stay current on potential service changes meant to "encourage" you to switch to the hosted model.
• Product Development: If you are considering the purchase of Score or Visitor Intelligence, get a clear understanding regarding pricing, support and the product development path. The management who left the company were key figures in bringing these deeper analytics solutions to market. It's not clear at this point what the new CEO and CMO will want to do with these offerings. Given the promotion of Rodkin and Chang, it seems logical that WebTrends will focus on doing more to sell WebTrends Analytics and Dynamic Search.
• Customer Commitment: If you are an enterprise customer of WebTrends, and have a significant investment in using their solutions, speak with the new CEO and understand the company's commitment to your organization going forward. It may be the best way to understand Francisco Partners' longterm strategy for WebTrends.

While there's no way to predict what will happen with WebTrends, I doubt they'll be acquired Omniture.

Are you a WebTrends customer? I'd love to get your thoughts on the current changes. Drop me a line at pkemelor@cmswatch.com

Organizations have an overwhelming desire to own and control. Even within organizations, each unit/department is constantly trying to prove that it is important.

While writing reviews for the new Enterprise Search Report, I found myself frequently saying you should test the effectiveness of a given product against your own corpus of content, which is reiterated in the Report's "Advice" section. But I can't help but wonder how often an actual bake-off between vendors on a shortlist is organized.

I was giving a presentation on the "enterprise search technology landscape" at cmf2007, along with practitioner's cases presented by Brian Schurmann Michels (Novo Nordisk) and Carsten Suhr (DSB, Danish Rail). Both were using search engines to sift through their intranets, but circumstances and solutions were on the opposite ends of the spectrum: Novo Nordisk has a Google Appliance index their relatively structured content (most of which is tagged with keywords), while DSB uses Autonomy to federate disparate content sources (and to allow for their ambitious future plans). This made sense and they both seemed quite content with the technology they were working with in their respective settings.

Both companies were thorough in their implementation. Brian (who has the official job title of "searchmaster") described the detailed comparison they had made of the results of the Google Appliance vs. Microsoft's SharePoint at Novo Nordisk. Carsten talked about the search scenarios and personas DSB had developed: how could the search engine effectively help employees perform their daily tasks? Both were excellent examples of how I would suggest you'd go about selecting and implementing search technology.

Of course, the $100,000 question (putting the estimate at the low end) for me was how they had arrived at the choice for their respective vendors. Why would Novo Nordisk consider trading in their Google Appliance -- which by all accounts they were rather content with -- for SharePoint search? Well, because "SharePoint is being rolled out anyway, whether we want it or not." And why did DSB shell out for Autonomy licenses? Well, because "people in our IT department had experience with Verity's products" (and Verity was acquired by Autonomy).

So, for all their intensive testing and planning -- and DSB did perform a thorough PoC with Autonomy before committing -- the main question remains: what do you do if the only entry in your bake-off wins second prize? When the race is run, it's too late to enter a new horse -- which is why I'll stick to my mantra of investigating the alternatives in the early stages of any search project.

The twists, turns and tips you need for staying up-to-date by the water cooler. This weekÂ’s highlights include: * Test Their Might: JumpBox Opens Proving Grounds An invite-only beta testing community wants you! * Social Media vs the Marketing Campaign Microsite The microsite goes on Facebook. * Executing Social Media: Deep Thinking in the Deep South Live coverage from Executive Social Media in Atlanta. * Oye! Get Yourself a Mobile Website, and Quickly Make unlimited changes with a DIY mobile website building tool. * America's Web Marketers Go On Getting it Wrong Most companies delayed and dysfunctional when it comes to Web marketing. Shocking. * Defensio Comes Out Guns a-Blazing (Against Spam) Waging a war against comment spammers. No comment. And these are the articles you couldnÂ’t get enough of -- if page views are anything to go by, anyways. The gist? Open source. Challenges, threats and content management. * Joomla! Wins Best PHP Open Source Web CMS * Bitnami: Free Open Source Content Management Stacks * Movable Type 4.0 vs. Expression Engine 1.6 * 7 Challenges of Implementing a Content Management System * Open Source Web CMS's Threaten Commercial Marketshare Looking to advance your career? Or has your org got empty seats in need of savvy CMSers? You're just in time to catch the best fish of the season in our content management industry job board. Featured Jobs: * Business Analyst with DWH/BI at eTouch * Web Content Manager at Dept. of Justice, via Ameri-Force Management Services * Lead Technical Writer at PaperThin, Inc. * Video Producer at Congressional Quarterly * Snr. Field Marketing Manager at RedDot * Sales Manager UK at Nuxeo

Thanks for the support y'all. The likes of Adido Solutions, Alpha Card, Asbru, Bitrix Soft, BrowserMedia, CMS Watch, Digital Original, Ektron, eTouch SamePage, The Gilbane Group, Hot Banana, NetReach cmScribe, Quantum Art, Sitecore, Telerik Sitefinity, Toshiba, Xythos and of course dear old uncle Google have kept the Nespresso machines running this week. And we are thankful. Support CMSWire! Learn more about advertising with us.

CMS Watch is frequently -- and I think justifiably -- critical of Vignette's "VCM" web content management platform (c.f., my review of their new management interface).

But in fairness, there is one thing that the product does fairly well, though it's not always easy to get a handle on it.

Here's what it is. After a history of poor metadata and taxonomy support, Vignette implemented a real classification system on top of its traditional "channels" motif of binding content items to your site hierarchy. Also, editorial teams can organize content items into arbitrarily-structured "projects" on the back end. Combined, these three ways of organizing content can be quite useful.

First, it allows you to have "placed" and "placeless" content on the same site, or even the same page. That is, sometimes contributors need to actively place content in a particular spot or spots and know it will appear there. In other cases, you want content to appear according to its classification (you tagged a content item "Manitoba", so it will appear in the "Canada" section of your site). With most Web CMS tools, you have to have to choose between placed or placeless approaches, and many customers are quite rightly reluctant to turn their entire site over to a placeless, metadata-driven model where authors and managers alike can never be quite certain where a new page will appear. With Vignette, you can tag content against a hierarchical taxonomy, as well as assign items to particular "channels" which are representations of website locales. In a well thought-through publishing regime, this combination can offer a lot of power.

On the back-end, being able to organize content items against an arbitrary scheme that doesn't actually reflect the published site is also handy. It makes it easier for individuals and teams to work on ad-hoc projects, sorting and storing information in a way that makes sense to them, before it gets published.

Note that Vignette salespeople don't always describe these features very well. "We have three taxonomies," one rep explained rather unhelpfully at a customer pitch I saw recently. To be sure, for a simple site, three organizational models is more of a liability than an asset. But for complex publishing operations, I think this kind of flexibility is quite handy.

Hyland Software Inc, has announced the release of version 7 of its OnBase ECM software suite. They went big on this release, offering an extensive array of new capabilities and features, including MS Office SharePoint Search integration, Expanded Business Process Management (BPM) Functionality, and solutions for hospitals, universities, and even law enforcement agencies.

On the hunt for a value add with minimal commitment? Check out these webinars for NTEN. The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) is an organization comprised of IT professionals working to empower non-profits to utilize new technology. Members learn how to “strategically use technology so that they, in turn, make the world a better, just, and equitable place.” Those involved also get a plethora of opportunities to network, from discussion groups to webinars. Salivating yet? As NTEN's Member Appreciation Month comes to a close, the org is hosting three webinars in three days. They focus on topics like online giving, fundraising and implementing Internet strategies. More details below.

The people at Jumpbox, Inc. want to know if you have what it takes to join Proving Grounds, where brave participants put it all on the line toÂ… test upcoming JumpBox beta software (hey, this is a techie site, after all)! The provider of virtual appliances has announced the launch of the JumpBox Proving Grounds, an invite-only beta testing community. Proving Grounds gives members access to new JumpBoxes, special offers and news not otherwise available to the public.

AhhÂ…to be a mom in todayÂ’s world of Internet dominance. To have big networks clamoring for your attention, night and day, anxiously waiting to tell you celebritiesÂ’ views on childrearing, must satisfy every motherÂ’s daily needs. If only the 'net actually changed the diapers.

MessageGate, a provider of enterprise email governance solutions, says that after doing extensive customer and market research, they have upgraded their product to include features to help customers better control email going into, out of, and across the organization.

There's a growing trend in marketing circles that leads away from the campaign microsite as a staple for communicating a brand. It moves toward the use of social media sites like Facebook and MySpace. Does this mean social media is reaching further into the web content world and taking away from traditional forms of online content for organizations?

This morning there was an announcement on the Magnolia user mailing list that the first release candidate (RC1) of version 3.5 is now available for download. If you were waiting for version 3.1, don't worry, you didn't miss it. It is the same release. Still, this is a pretty big release. Some of the more notable features is better internationalization support. It used to be that localized sites needed to be managed more or less independently with no real relationships between different translations of the same asset. The new version provides better support for 1:1 localization schemes. Future releases and add-on modules will provide more functionality in this area. The new version has also been re-factored to be easier to customize. For example, many of the configurations have been transformed into beans that can be overridden and extended. There is also better support for filters. Security has also been enhanced with URL level access control (in addition to content level access control).

The Enterprise Edition will be released after the Community Edition is final and stabilized. If you are using Magnolia Community Edition, you might want to download it and give it a try - especially if you have built modules. The Magnolia team has tried to support backward compatibility for 3.0 modules but you never know. Now would be a good time to tell them if there is a problem.

These days, thereÂ’s a lot of talk about regulatory compliance. Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and any number of non federal regulations have caused business owners much concern about security and records management. In our search for the Utopia that is foolproof identity, we often overlook the simplest solution of all: Unified Source.

Back in the bad old days, when you sent an email somewhere containing some vital, time sensitive information, you just assumed that it got there, and that it would not 'conveniently' get lost or delayed somewhere along the line. Yes, you laugh, but it's true. When you sent a registered or notarized letter through either the mail or a courier service, you only certified the damn envelope, and not what was in it. Back in the day, you could send someone a contract to sign, and they could send it back to you with a crucial page missing, and claim that that page in question was not included in the original document. And then you might find yourself in a good old-fashioned mess. For you, that day might have been today. But, at the risk of sounding like a corny advert, maybe tomorrow will be different.