Content Management Models

Content Circles, a leading provider of distributed content management and collaboration solutions, recently announced pricing for the newly launched Content Circles, the flagship solution that revolutionizes the way people collaborate and manage content across companies. Content Circles represents a revolutionary new approach to both the technology and pricing model for enabling distributed and mobile teams to collaboratively create, share, and manage documents within and among companies and organizations on a worldwide basis.

In a recent article and blog entry, my colleague Tony talked about both the popularity of Software as a Service or hosted model and some of the potential dangers. In our 2008 Web Content Management Report we cover two pure-play SaaS vendors, Clickability and CrownPeak. Both are venture-backed, both have shown consistent growth recently, and today Clickability announced that it has received a second round of funding of $8 million, bringing its total outside funding to $15.3 million. One of the critical concerns of potential SaaS buyers who are thinking about trusting their content on someone else's servers is the vendor's stability. This concern is even more important when evaluating a company like Clickability, who for most of their customers not only hosts their clients' content management system, but also the clients' customer facing sites. Clickability customers will likely find some re-assurance that there is more money behind the company protecting their investments

CMS Watch was recently interviewed by Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL) for their fine monthly e-newsletter. Being in the document conversion business, DCL is very interested in migration and re-use, both thorny topics. The interview provided an opportunity to re-iterate: the most important asset to any CMS strategy -- like nearly everything else in business -- is good management. Without an ability to foresee in very practical terms what your enterprise intends to do with its content, the best laid content models may well be for naught...See the Interview

The experience of the adoption of the system, pressure from the larger international banks to allow the use of internal models of risk management, and recent financial scandals led the BCBS to produce a new, more sophisticated agreement: the Basel II framework. Basel II is an attempt to fine-tune therisk management provisions of Basel I, and introduces new corporate and supervisory governance provisions to help support these changes. Submitted by TOWER Software

Seth Gottlieb does a nice job of summarizing various models for pushing content from a management environment to a delivery environment. While the Web CMS industry used to be neatly divided between "coupled" and "de-coupled" systems, today we see a real continuum of choices, even within the same vendor's product. Choices are good. As Seth points out, you need to assess your requirements carefully here. Be sure to factor in performance, cost, security, maintainability, reliability, and contributor-experience implications.

Everybody says metadata and classification schemes are great, but there remains a dearth of good knowledge about how to apply them effectively in web content management. Christian Ricci has written an excellent article on the topic, "Developing and Creatively Leveraging Hierarchical Metadata and Taxonomy" in Boxes and Arrows, a fine webzine (via James Robertson). Don't let the ponderous title fool you, the piece has lots of good advice. We particularly like the way Chris distinguishes different models -- Universal Hierarchy vs. Content Mapping -- for using classification and metadata in content management vs. delivery environments...Read the Article

Connecting content management services to other e-business applications is difficult -- and tricky. The rise of Web Services should provide some creative solutions, but in the meantime, companies must often choose between two competing models: doing e-business off their CM platform (Vignette), or plugging CM into their e-business infrastructure (Interwoven et. al.). Along comes Swiss CM vendor Day with a third approach -- a unified "ContentBus" in its Communiqué product that provides a generic set of CM services to disparate back-end processes...Visit Day

In a recent talk on open source web content management, Seth Gottlieb listed some myths commonly trotted out by critics of that particular licensing model. Open source will cost you more than commercial software Open source developers are hobbyists and hackers Open source software is not supported Companies that can afford commercial software buy itSeth also balanced his talk with a set of myths espoused by open source zealots: Open source software will cost you no money Open source makes software better Open source = Open standards With open source you get a community

Lou Rosenfeld graciously interviewed me for Digital Web magazine. We touched on a wide variety of subjects, including rising tensions between "web" and "enterprise" content management groups within large organizations, as well as the coming importance of canonical design patterns. Specifically: Relativists think that all content management systems must be unique because companies’ content models and business processes are unique. Determinists—and some CMS consultants fall into this camp—think that they have figured content management out and therefore one need only apply their governance, organizational, or technical model, and everything will be fine. The right answer, of course, lies in between those two extremes.I'll be elaborating on this idea next week in Denmark.