Reddot cms

Open Text has announced today the release of “next generation” Web Solutions. The fancy name is, in essence, a new release of the company’s Web CMS child — RedDot. It’s a name change and a total rebranding makeover. With all the underlying RedDot WCM technology still in the backbone, it is now called Web Solutions. The focus of this new release is on intranets, extranets, Enterprise 2.0 solutions and Web 2.0 tools that come armed with greater security and control over social media initiatives.

Our newest and meatiest report casts its eyes on Europe and evaluates Day, MediaSurface, Tridion, RedDot, and Gauss, in addition to updating the usual cast of characters. We now examine 25 vendors and counting...Find Out More About the Report

It seems like 2006 will be a major upgrade year, and not just for the large enterprise vendors. Those in the broader Microsoft ecosystem are already evolving. In Europe Hummingbird's RedDot will showcase its newest update at CEBIT in March. This new version begins a transition to .NET (Read more: (auf Deutch | crude English translation). Danish vendor Synkron is also moving from plain Active Server Pages to .NET, likely at a faster clip. As a licensee you should remember that there is a first-mover disadvantage – it is usually the first few customers who directly or indirectly pay for educating the vendor and implementation partners about the impact of changes. Read more in the updated reviews of these and competing products in the new edition of The CMS Report.

After many inquiries, CMS Watch has made individual product chapters (from our larger evaluation reports) available for sale. Find them off our individual product pages. These chapters don't include all the instructional front matter defining terms and offering implementation advice -- just the straight story about a particular product and vendor. So if all you want to do is compare RedDot to Ektron or Liferay to JBoss, now you can do so more inexpensively.

Content management as a service continues to gain traction. One measure of its growing popularity is the high percentage of start-up CMS vendors electing to go the hosted route. Established players also continue to experiment with hosted offerings. In some cases market reaction has been underwhelming -- Stellent and RedDot's hosted content management services have not taken off. Recently PaperThin and MediaSurface have announced hosted Web CMS offerings. They too will face challenges: it can be hard to run software as a service that wasn't built that way from the ground up, and both companies risk alienating integration partners. Nevertheless, for buyers this experimentation means more choices, and choice is good...PaperThin's Hosted EditionMediasurface Plans (See Trend #7)

Every web content management package has its merits and quirks. So practical advice about how to improve performance for authors and readers alike can be invaluable. A white paper from Canadian RedDot integration partner "non-linear creations" offers just such advice, some of which could apply regardless of vendor. For example, unlike many other CMS tools, RedDot does not require a single "root" template, but it's still a good idea to create one anyway. The paper also shows how to annotate content types in RedDot, then associate them directly with templates to reduce authors' confusion, and how to manually create user-friendly page names. We'd like to see more integrators publishing similar tips...Read the white paper (registration req'd)

In a recent blog entry about upgrades I riffed on hidden costs. Earlier this week CMS vendor RedDot (now part of Hummingbird) released a new upgrade to their their two main products, CMS 6.5 and LiveServer 2.3. LiveServer is an optional module that offers lightweight content delivery and personalization. RedDot smoothly avoids calling this a "portal," while noting that RedDot 6.5 offers integration to Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. Interestingly, on the RedDot's German site they already mention the upcoming LiveServer 2.5, with some very portal-like features, including JSR-168 support.

RedDot has upgraded its Web CMS offering, adding several new user-interface improvements. One of the most welcome mdofication -- assuming it works as advertised -- is the new versioning and management capability for templates. As CMS Report readers know, this has long been a sore spot with RedDot systems developers...

Bob Doyle of CMS Review did a superb job filming the "CMS Idol" competition at last month's Gilbane Conference in Boston. To rehash, 6 vendors competed in live, 7-minute demos: Stellent, RedDot, WebSideStory, Interwoven, FatWire, and Ektron. The audience voted a winner (RedDot), but I thought they were all victorious for withstanding the critiques of the expert panel. Thanks to Bob, now you can see the re-runs yourself.

On its website, CMS vendor RedDot (now an Open Text subsidiary) points out that 3 years ago we lauded their CMS product for its localization and authoring capabilities. Well, we learn over time as we talk to more customers. And products change over time -- or rather don't always change with the times. So it is with RedDot CMS, whose European customers tell us that its localization capabilities are aging, and its globalization facilities surprisingly underdeveloped. It will be interesting to see whether RedDot can make needed usability improvements over the next year while it tries to reconcile codebases with Open Text's other WCM and ECM tools, and still upgrade its back-end to .NET. You can find more details in The CMS Report.

RedDot is proud that Forrester now recognizes them. We could well attribute this to better analyst relations. A more meaningful marker of the company's maturity is RedDot's first customer summit, slated for June in the USA and Germany. This is a significant milestone, because it implies a critical mass of entrenched customers as well as sufficient resources at the vendor to pull it off (and RedDot has not always been the most, well, organized company). In any case, chalk up one more thriving mid-market CMS vendor that Microsoft never squashed...