The CMS twiterarty have had various memes over the last year or so. Evil man Kas Thomas (note, I can’t call him an Evil Genius BTW) started it all with his CMS Vendor Meme, then recently we have had the Laurence Hart’s CMS Origins meme.
Around the end of July I started the Future of Content Management meme which a number of us answered (not all I noticed!). We reached no conclusion and why would we? The future is not so easy to read as all that… so when I saw this my heart skipped a beat. Not only is it not tagged correctly but it does not even mention the original post! So what happened, was it stolen or not?

To be honest I can’t see what came first, but judging by Irina’s post on CMS Wire being the first to mention the summit then I have month lead on that. I even checked the page source of the summit website to see if there was a first published date, but that revealed nothing more than a lack of metatags.

I can imagine that Day wants to discuss the future of content management with its customers, it is a fantastic idea. I don’t agree that Day is it, but their customers bought the software so I think for them it probably is the future. And before anyone mentions it, I don’t think _any_ vendor is the future.

Of course, I do not own the future of content management but it does make you think. I feel a little like the boy in the school yard who just had his lunch money stolen.

Hashtag: #CMSFuture
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Today, as I write this post, I am flying between Amsterdam and Chicago on my way to San Francisco. I did not take the direct flight – before anyone points that out – because of the time I have to be back. My flight this morning was overbooked but they guaranteed me a seat on the plane and told me that I would find out later where I will sit. As it turns out, I got an upgrade to business class. Moments before I found that out I heard an announcement about an option for people to upgrade to business class for 450 Euros. I tisked scornfully under my breath and mumbled something about being an idiot to take up the option. Moments later I was in business class for free and I suddenly felt allot more important. Now that is what I call value for money!

So in-between sipping my white wine and I shall have a look at what everyone wrote about the Future of Content Management…

Whilst many of you professed and inability to look into the future, it was clear you all have more than an idea on many aspects. Some of us have more of a dream than others… some of posted based upon your leaning from either ECM, WCM and commercial or open source. And some wrote their own rules to how they were going to respond. As my only rule was “there are no rules” I liked the spirit of doing something different.

I cannot really attempt to outline exactly what everyone said; it is just too much to take on in a way that would justify the meaning of each article. For that you need to read them for yourself and you will find the links at the bottom.

Vendors
With the recent acquisitions and the general downturn it is likely that the face of vendors will change more that is already has done over the course of the next year. The recent Forrester and Gartner reports have re-asserted some companies positions and surprise people with how some of the reports view other companies. Those that do well will no doubt pick on the weak until we lose a few more vendors. Is Open Source the way? Well as Adriaan Bloem pointed out Open Source is just another license. If commercial software has trappings then Open Source does too, just different ones. I am not a believer that open source will over take commercial software, just that commercial software will leverage open source (and especially open connectivity) just as well as Open Source. In that the playing field will remain level for a long time to come.

I hope and pray monolithic vendors die a slow and painful death but I just know uncreative people will continue to advise customers to invest in such solutions.

Technology
“I’ve been in this WCM industry awhile, so lets put aside the crystal ball a minute and ask if we have yet delivered on the CMS promise of 10 years ago? ”

Judging by the thoughts from everyone the simple answer is NO.

Whilst Ian was talking about making the people have the power, the quote fits right in here too. We all grumbled about the lack of standards and the continuation of proprietary standards that rule our customers. There is CMIS but it lacks a really usable implementation and JCR just is not a standard. Yes, it is if you use java but not for the rest of the world.

Uniform repository access will definitely help but mostly it is going to help with being able to migrate systems and join multiple systems together. In the end if we cannot fix even the smallest of real world problems you can forget trying to get two different CMS systems to just “Plug and Talk” On the other hand it is good to know that Sense/Net “barely has any serious CMS vendor issues that have been upsetting customers throughout the years”, even if the list was not complete.

Concepts
I spend allot of time thinking about this (well OK, a little bit of time) and it is something I like to hear people like Frank talk about. He has great views on what content is and how it should be used – but did not post on this topic (booo!). Challenges we have are how to use the content we have, how long should it exist and what even is content? Is the content that we produce going to live and die in a moment or does it have real life? Social media is perpetuating content that has a very limited life. When was the last time you looked for a Twitter post you had seen a while back? You do not, it has ceased to exist, it is an ex-piece of content. If anything Twitter is a discovery engine, you can discover what is going on, not where to buy a cheap car. This short life also means that some social content has a much more limited value and you can be more risky with it. However, most commercial CMS systems do not truly hand the power to the people, there is also limited tools to help employees create, manage and distribute content remotely or on the move which is something social media requires. For open source the picture gets better, but the most I can manage is Twitter from my iPhone.

That said, almost all vendors push social media connectivity as part of their products but as Ian points out “But, for all that, websites are still the destination – the majority of tweets are linking people with web content. “ So, do not only give us Twitter to tweet our content, give us the mobile application to write the content and then tweet it.

In the end the Twitter bubble will burst unless something happens to give it true value. If that happens the selling point of Content Management Systems will move to other new topics, and hopefully this will be a back to basics move on making content work powerfully rather than enhancing their offering with badly integrated applications that demo well.

Articles
The full list of articles is as follows:

• Technology of Content
• Contented Management
• Jon Marks
• Persuasive Content
• Sense/NET
• Darren Ferguson
• Content Circles
• Stephane Croisier
• Peter Monk
• Laurence Hart
• Tony Bailey
• Kas Thomas and the response to this post from Justin Cormack
• Lee Dallas
• Lee Smith

There is still chance to contribute to the discussion by posting your view on the Future of Content Management. We did not hear from a great many people, if you post then do not forget to tag your post.

Hashtag: #CMSFuture
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Even before Jon’s post I have been trying to be inspired to write something that I feel passionate enough about to post. I guess I have been too busy to think, net alone get the time to actually post.  However, late last night inspiration hit me and then, after consideration it hit me again! So I put aside the first idea and moved on to the latter one.

It occurred to me that all the CMS gurus are not really discussing. Sure we are partaking in the “global conversation”, blogging and commenting and some of us actually seem to do this for a job. For a discussion you need a topic. Evil genius Kas Thomas managed this, to some extent, with the CMS Vendor Meme but that was too general and too now for what I want to hear. So I have come up with the following challenge.

My challenge is to all the CMS gurus that read or see this post (and by god am I going to try and make sure you read it) is to write a blog post with the title “The Future of Content Management” and start with the line “The future of Content Management is… “. Clearly there is alot of scope in the answer which is of course the idea. Post your answer on your blog and comment on this post with your link. Don’t forget to use the tag in twitter and on your post.

After my holiday I will be checking back on progress. Some of your comments will have to wait until I am back to approve them (sorry), so please be patient.

Hashtag: #CMSFuture
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