Web CMS support

Fact: Open source business models can be profitable and consistent. eZ Systems’ open source Web CMS — eZ Publish — has raked up an impressive triple-digit growth and double-digit renewal rates for the first half of 2008. This is the first time eZ Systems achieved a profitable bottom line. It took 8 years and more than $US 10 million of investments. Who needs to sell a product, when you can just as easily monetize support, maintenance and guarantees? Well, eZ Systems had it all figured out for the first half of 2008.

CMS Watch readers know that we often look favorably on old-line DM vendors, who tend to understand complex content structures and sometimes offer strong XML support. But it is a wide chasm for them to cross to compete with newer Web CM products, and some of the smaller ones aren't making it. Buzz out of last week's XML2001 Conference was that Chrystal Software, developer of Astoria, is winding down...No news yet on the Chrystal website

After a string of noisy acquisitions, OpenText found itself inconveniently in possession of no less than 3 Web content management solutions -- Obtree from Ixos, Gauss, and the Web Publisher within its own collaboration tool, Livelink. (OpenText also supports a handful of competing DM products, but that's another story.) Today the company announced the forthcoming release of a new Web CMS package to rule them all, "Livelink Web Content Management Server." OpenText will wisely continue support for the other tools, because inevitably, "upgrading" any time soon could prove prohibitive for much of its client base...Read about Livelink Web Content Management Server

A recent IBM Systems Journal surveyed open-source Web CMS tool, MMBase (pdf). The history of MMBase is strikingly similar to other open-source projects: a CMS application gets developed by major media firm; source opened up for broader support; mostly regional base of supporters catches on; community struggles to get to the next level. It's a good story well told, and an important one to understand if you're going to consider any open-source business tool. Thanks to Martin White for the pointer.

CMS Watch analytics lead Phil Kemelor recently shared some insights into the latest version of WebTrends with the readers of Intelligent Enterprise magazine. To quote: "WebTrends in seven words: complex, robust, well-supported, and potentially expensive."

In a newly published cover story in EContent magazine, we argued that longtime predictions of consolidation in the Web CMS space may be premature. Sure, there will be more mergers, but note that in the case of eGrail (like OpenMarket and Eprise before it), the product is not going away -- it's just getting a new owner. Even former EBT and Chrystal users are obtaining support from integrators who propose to continue enhancing those products. So get used to a world with 200+ CMS vendors. But know also that under the hood, the products are beginning to diverge in some important ways. There are clearer choices out there. Get informed...

On the heels of my article about the difference between "managed services" using traditional software vs. native SaaS offerings, I got a message from a friend whose company may be in a bit of a jam.It turns out they use a native SaaS Web CMS provider, a local vendor. They're worried because the vendor's biggest customer has left the service. Now, this is a risk with any software model: if a single large customer or two is driving development and support, and they exit, it's a risk for all the other, smaller customers. In this case, my friend's company is wondering whether the entire service will remain viable going forward, particularly because it's a "coupled" CMS that also serves up their website. Seems to me they have much more at stake than a traditional software customer running their own application. Among other things, the SaaS customers might have to migrate quickly in any crisis

The open-source CMS package Midgard is not very popular in North America, but it sports a wide following in Central and Eastern Europe, including a core group of developers who have slowly re-architected the package after a semi-dormant period early in the decade. Midgard uses PHP and MySQL (nothing unusual there) and ships with some special Apache webserver modules for performance (that's novel). The latest release (1.7.6, in case you're counting) builds on some previous attempts to make the package play better in standard corporate environments, including integration with Apache Lucene for search, and JSR-170 support as well.

As CMS Report readers know, the open-souce Zope content management platform has traditionally been highly customizable but curiously self-contained. With the new Zope 3 effort, the platform is beginning to open up a bit. Most importantly, Zope has announced that it is switching out its own ZServer webserver with a more broadly-supported webserver, Twisted.Web, built on the "Twisted" python framework from Twisted Matrix Laboratories. Some might still prefer Apache, but Twisted is known for its scalability and security, so it's a definite improvement over ZServer. Twisted, by the way, is a young community worth watching. Meanwhile, Seth Gottlieb details how he managed to get a large, Zope-based CMS installation to run off an Oracle database, in lieu of the embedded Zope Object DB.

"OpenAdvantage" has been funded by the regional government in West Midlands, UK to promote open-source software in general and CMS solutions in particular. The center has an impressive list of events and seminars, all free. They have also published some decent introductory reviews of various open-source Web CMS packages. Interestingly for a publicly-supported institution, their analyst has listed which open-source tools they won't support and why. I'd quibble with some of the judgments (e.g. that OpenCms is "harder to host"), but at least they are open about it.