Content Management Vendors

For boutique content management vendors like Digitalus CMS, flexibility comes comparatively easily. There are no multiple corporate hoops to jump though, and development cycles seem to be moving a bit faster (which can also turn into a double-edged sword).Not long ago, we looked (in detail and with a fair portion of constructive criticism) at Digitalus 1.5. The vendor informs us that they've heard us and made templating changes in the newest version of the product — Digitalus CMS 1.8.It seems the chances of breaking the entire front end are now minimized.

Today we updated our semi-famous "subway map" for 2009, expanding it out to 100 stations (among the 200 vendors we cover). From the accompanying release: "The most important characteristic of the technologies we cover is the sheer diversity of vendors, particularly when you account for regional differences..."

Other content management vendors have two choices when it comes to SharePoint — join it or beat it. The product is entrenched at the departmental level, nevertheless aspiring competitor, Alfresco, think they can uproot enough MOSS to make business sense of a full assault. Others seek harmony. Day Software is one of these. And their latest claim is that they can help SharePoint grow from department collaboration to enterprise content management.

In his latest quarterly essay about interaction design, Henrik Olsen writes about "The promised land of prototyping". Olsen lists the many advantages of the approach, including how it satisfies customers' wish to see quick results. His advice particularly applies to content management, search, and portal projects, where prototyping can reduce endemic scope creep and provide a master plan for implementation (which Henrik also mentions as advantages). Prototyping also comes in handy during vendor evaluations. Nevertheless prototyping is sometimes avoided: some regard it as a waste of time and the word also has a negative connotation in some regions of the world. In that event, use the phrase "proof-of-concept" instead, because Olsen is right, there are no downsides to prototyping.

In late 2004 the W3C announced the release of "XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0" as a final Recommendation. Announced near the winter holidays, the release did not receive major attention outside the XML community. The W3C summarizes that "XInclude 1.0 is a generic mechanism for merging XML documents," typically by way of reference. Many content management vendors -- particularly those focused on techdocs and single-source use-cases -- support content fragment re-use today largely through proprietary means. Now there is potential for important functionality to become more broadly standardized at the language and representation level. That's a good thing. Vendor support will inevitably lag the standard; nevertheless, it represents welcome news for the content management community...Read More on the Cover Pages

Late notice, but check out this worthy forum on "XML Authoring/Editing & Content Management of Legislative and Regulatory Documents" in Washington, DC, on September 21st. The second in an annual series put on the by the Washington XML users' group and the Federal Government XML Working Group (with some help from CMS Watch), the forum mixes vendor demonstrations and agency case studies. Exhibiting vendors pay the XML users' group a nominal fee to cover costs, so for attendees, admittance is free...Find out more

Ailing SCM vendor and erstwhile CMS supplier Starbase found a savior in Borland this week. Starbase was already softpedalling its CMS package, "eXpressroom," and we suspect Borland will find content management even farther from its core competency. Here's what Borland's CFO said about the acquisition: "Starbase is recognized for its market-leading solutions in the areas of requirements management, version control, collaboration, and defect tracking." Notice anything missing? So you can probably remove one more package from your long list of possible CMS solutions...Read the Borland Announcement

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

Here's one way out for content management vendors stuck in the netherworld between infrastructure mammoths and sprightly niche players: sell out to a private-equity firm. That's what Serena did, Broadvision tried to do, and now Hummingbird has pulled off, with its pending acquisition by Symphony Technology Group (Hummingbird's board has approved the deal, but its shareholders could theoretically veto it). For Hummingbird customers, the deal may seem attractive compared to, say, a messy merger with a competing vendor. The company's new owners will doubtless stress continuity and efficiencies. It's certainly cheaper to operate a privately-held company. But change could come swiftly nonetheless: private-equity groups often get paid by making tough cuts that previous management was unwilling or unable to make. You could also see this as a quick but graceful exit by Hummingbird's management, several of whom were large shareholders who can now unload their stock for a decent sum

We like migration tools. They're practical. The professional services arms of most CMS vendors can produce perl scripts that will parse your HTML and try to drop it as nice neat chunks into their repositories. Now along comes a small Canadian company, Metalogix, with a migration product geared specifically for MS Content Management Server 2002. Through a nifty WYSIWYG interface, the product generates a routine to map unstructured HTML into XML that can be handled by MS CMS. As always, the consistency and quality of your underlying HTML will be a big factor in how labor-intensive this effort becomes, migration tool or not...Visit Metalogix

StepTwo's James Robertson helpfully deconstructs the concept of "content interoperability" in a new whitepaper published today. One immediate conclusion is that that "integration" can mean many different things, encompassing at least 4 different architectural tiers. The other inevitable conclusion is the relative dearth of mature standards out there. Integrating content management systems today remains, with some exceptions, an exercise in experimentation; that's why we're hopeful that organizations like CM Pros can begin to capture and label the implementation patterns across vendor solutions...