Julian Wraith » CMS Vendor meme

Vignette starts round two?

Jules — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:49:29 +0000

Twitter searches have indicated that Vignette maybe writing a new CMS Vendor Meme for Enterprise CMS Vendors. The tweet from @kirstenpetra reads:

“starting my meme for Enterprise CMS vendors … getting feedback from the gallery … send questions if you like”

I welcome this from Vignette and I would eagerly await a new set of questions. If this is indeed the case, hope the community would enjoy it as much as the last and hopefully the questions will be nice and well balanced. Whilst a large number of CMS vendors have the capability to serve both large and small organisations, the positioning of the vendor is usually to serving either enterprise or smaller organisations. In the case of the latter, the vendor needs to be more open to serve that market. It was a point that Vignette made clear when they posted their response to the last CMS Vendor Meme.

Now if there is a new Meme I can’t wait… and maybe this one will encourage others who did not respond to the last one to respond this time.

Meme ID 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf suggested by Bertrand Delacrétaz. Find more related pages on Google.

Autonomy Interwoven responds to the meme

Jules — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:36:22 +0000

Tom Wentworth of Autonomy Interwoven responded to the CMS Vendor Meme yesterday making that 16 companies who have responded. Autonomy Interwoven, like OpenText did not score their answers which will leave it up to everyone else to make their minds up. You can read their response on Tom Wentworth’s blog.

Meme ID 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf suggested by Bertrand Delacrétaz. Find more related pages on Google.

Vignette answers the CMS Vender Meme

Jules — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:01:44 +0000

Vignette is the first of the enterprise WCM vendors to reply to the CMS Watch’s reality checklist. I was especially interested in this reply as it seemed to sum up what I feel about the list. If you split the CMS vendors into two lists, those that share very openly with the public community and those that do not then I work for one in the latter category. Those vendors in that category tend to be the larger players or those who do not have an open source philosophy. Vignette makes a very good point when it states that:

“This particular meme represents a set of key operational criteria for stand-alone, SMB-focused software targeted at companies where a CMS would usually be installed and managed by a very small IT team, sometimes even a department of one. While that is nice, we find that the Enterprise customers we serve don’t typically let the needs of IT drive their Web experience decisions – there are CMOs and business leaders whose P&Ls demand excellence online and who define success based on business results”

Skimming past the (very) well crafted text, it states – if I may paraphrase – “it’s a nice meme, but we don’t serve the same types of organisations that you do”. When I looked at the same set of questions from my own eyes, I thought the same thing. Why would I need to contact support from the user interface? Every customer I know has a helpdesk of their own. Vignette also points this point out and goes on to state that “and then [the customers helpdesk] add those to our Ticketing System at Vignette via Vignette Connect.”. Maybe we need another set that they would be more suited to or maybe we should stop tagging them like crazy .

I will be really interested to see who else responds. I’ve very much enjoyed the good spirit in which all the vendors have responded. From the CMS Watch list of Enterprise WCM vendors; Open Text, Oracle, Interwoven, IBM and Documentum all have not responded. Come on, it’s not too late!

Update 20/03/2009: Adding the meme ID 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf suggested by Bertrand Delacrétaz. Find more related pages on Google.

CMS Vendors go head to head

Jules — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:12:34 +0000

A few weeks back CMS Watch’s Kas Thomas posted his “reality checklist” for CMS vendors. Each vendor should ask themselves 15 tough questions about their product. Now Day has put down the challenge to all other CMS vendors, the CMS Vendor meme, to answer the questions from the check list.

Now, next to Day the CMS vendors have been posting their scores. Currently the leaderboard looks like:

44/45 – e-Spirit ***
43/45 – Jahia
43/45 – Hippo CMS
42/45 - Magnolia
42/45 – EPiServer
42/45 – GX *
42/45 – Midgard
42/45 – Nuxeo **
41/45 – infopark
41/45 – KnowledgeTree
40.5/45 – Enano
40/45 - Day
40/45 – Alfresco
40/45 – GX
40/45 – CoreMedia
40/45 – Sitecore
40/45 – Alterian
40/45 – OpenText
40/45 – Ez Systems
38/45 – dotCMS
37/45 – Vignette
37/45 – Autonomy Interwoven
36/45 – Escenic
33/45 – Sense/Net

bold scores are where the vendor did not score themselves but it was subsequentally worked out by Jon Marks
* Score adjusted to reflect original scoring system
** Vendor does not seem to be able to add up
*** Was 45, now 44

Many of the answers to the checklist are very tongue in cheek but many of the questions do not really go deep. Mostly the questions surround how available software is either to download, easy it is to install or how clear the pricing is. These are indeed important things but I do feel the list missing something more concrete. Only two of the questions (3 & 7), for instance, address something to do with content editing. Surely this is one of the most important areas to cover and thus deserves more attention?

Of course this list is not a complete check list, but it seems more tuned towards vendors such as Alfresco as most of these types of vendors will probably score highly. However, it is nice to see the vendors interacting together and at least, it seems, giving honest scores.

Update 19/03/2009: Adding the meme ID 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf suggested by Bertrand Delacrétaz. Find more related pages on Google.

Update 19/03/2009: Added infopark

Update 19/03/2009: Added dotCMS and Midgard (no scores yet though)

Update 19/03/2009: Added Vignette (no score either)

Update 20/03/2009: Added Nuxe (finally a score!)

Update 20/03/2009: Updated Escenic’s score

Update 21/03/2009: Added Sitecore’s, EPiServer’s & OpenText’s scores

Update 22/03/2009: Added Autonomy Interwoven (no score)

Update 23/03/2009: Added Alterian & Hippo CMS

Update 25/03/2009: Updated scores according to Jon Marks blog

Update 27/03/2009: Added KnowledgeTree

Update 02/04/2009: Added Enano

Update 03/04/2009: Added Ez Systems

Update 09/04/2009: added e-Spirit & Sense/Net

Update 15/04/2009: Updated e-Spirit score