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.
Thanks for your thoughts and support on the conceptual argument we made today. Since we don’t think the tagging is going to stop … we are going to post another meme with some different types of criteria next week … if you have any input on the Enterprise criteria, I am all ears:)
Thanks for picking up that OpenText also responded to the CMS Vendor Meme challenge: http://tinyurl.com/dmnuzs