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Of course, I'm paraphrasing the definition of "free software". Richard Stallman's example is used to point out the ambiguity of the term "free" in the English language. With free software, "you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer." Nevertheless, you should be warned: both open source beer (now in version 3.3) and free commercial beer have the potential for leaving you with a bit of a hangover.

If you really think enterprise search is a simple commodity -- and I will only comment on that with the obligatory statement that readers of our Enterprise Search Report will probably know better than that -- getting a free product would be ideal to get your feet wet (albeit somewhat sticky). I get invited to BYOB enterprise search parties a lot, and usually come up with Apache Lucene, IBM Omnifind Yahoo! Edition, and Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express. Let's get a closer taste of each.

Apache Lucene. Lucene is open source, which you are free to use. The problem is, it's not a complete enterprise search product -- it's a "text search engine API." What you get is a Java JAR with the core functionality of a search engine. In typical hardcore Java developer understatement this is described as "you write the easy stuff, the UI and the process of selecting and parsing your data files to pump them into the search engine, yourself." To developers that doesn't sound too difficult -- it's a library they'd be able to use to create search functionality for many applications. As they embark on that journey, however, many will find out they'll have to become experts on enterprise search to get their implementation to perform basic tasks any Google user has come to expect. Index Word documents? You'll have to convert those to text first. Remove stop words or perform spell checking? You'll have to get some more jars to fit that in. And that familiar user interface isn't so easy to replicate, either.

Of course, there's a couple of more "pre-packaged," Lucene-based engines (such as Nutch and Solr), but they'll only take you so far on that long and winding road. There's some excellent examples of what you can achieve with Lucene, but many more of how hard it can be to get there.

IBM Omnifind Yahoo! Edition (or OY!E). The Google appliances have the Google brand behind them, which must have got the IBM people thinking the Yahoo! brand would be excellent marketing for their free-to-use search engine. In fact, it's neither IBM nor Yahoo's technology, but Lucene wrapped in other open source software. A few commercial bits thrown in create a product that's easy to install and run. It will actually do many of the things Lucene will make you work hard to accomplish: it comes with support for several languages and quite a few source content filters. For users, it looks like a regular web search engine; for admins, there's a nicely designed and intelligible interface. In short, it does most of the things a Google Mini appliance will do -- but for free.

So what's the catch? Well, the license (by the way, what license?) limits you to 500,000 documents and 5 collections. After that, you can "upgrade" to other Omnifind products. But since the technology across the Omnifind line-up is completely different, this is the same as starting from scratch, and you'll pay for the privilege. I've been critical of the limitations of Google's appliances in the past, and sure, the 50,000 document limit of the entry-level Google Mini is a lot less than OY!E's half a million. But that comparison isn't really fair, considering the fact the Mini actually comes with the hardware to run the queries on for a mere $2,990. And don't think you'll be able to run IBM's software on an old abandoned test server you have available -- OY!E will need more power than the single blade Google Mini or Thunderstone Appliance to match the performance. Tellingly, I wasn't able to dig up an example of an OY!E implementation to mention while researching the Enterprise Search Report (if you know of one, let me know).

Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express. Microsoft's free offering is basically the same software as the non-Express version, but then there's the seemingly innocent limitation: one server only. I wouldn't want to continue the theme of this post by saying this is akin to handing out free samples of beer to get you hooked; suffice it to say that if you start to run the Express version in a production environment, there will, no doubt, come a time when a single server won't be enough anymore. When you've come to rely on the solution, you'll suddenly have to shell out for the licenses. As I've said before, having a free lunch isn't necessarily a bad thing; just remember that you'll probably have to pay for the beer the lunch comes with.

So, this might all start sounding like advice your mother gave you: never take anything from a stranger, and certainly no free alcoholic beverages. Don't forget, however, that I'm Dutch, and I've certainly developed a taste for enterprise search. Free beer sounds too good to be true, but it could certainly get your party started; just remember to drink in moderation, and never, ever, drink and drive. (Enterprise Search)

Edited by CMSWatch yesterday at 11:23 pm GMT

(new) BEA and Oracle in Chicago - I just spent a couple of days in Chicago at BEA's (oops, Oracle's) "Participate" user conference. This is where AquaLogic (née Plumtree) Portal/Collaboration/BPM customers come to meet without any pesky WebLogic enthusiasts around.

Of course the big question surrounding the whole event was the "roadmap" for these products going forward. We've blogged previously that Oracle finds itself in possession of no less than four portal products. As Enterprise Portals Report readers know, all four systems are all really quite different. (That ought to tell you something about the current marketplace.) Oracle, as vendors are wont to do, will likely tell customers that the benefits of using multiple portal products are additive. BEA customers should expect a new set of sales calls at some point this year.

Oracle itself says they can't make any official product announcements pending conclusion of a "quiet period" as they head to the close of their fiscal year at the end of Q2. I would guess that, except in general terms, they don't have specific plans for the BEA product lines, except to continue to sell and support them and see what the marketplace wants to do. Doubtless Oracle will come out with some general guidance about the future of the product -- if only to feed the insatiable industry analyst maw -- but roadmaps created in the immediate aftermath of large acquisitions should be treated with more than a usual dose of skepticism. In the meantime, Oracle says it will undertake a 50-city BEA customer love-fest around the world.

Still, an Oracle exec talked at the conference about how much Oracle was interested in BPM generally (BPM was a growing segment at BEA) and Oracle seems enthusiastic about the social software components around AquaLogic. Those remain a bit disjointed, but are still much more productized than what Oracle offers in its would-be enterprise 2.0, platforms, Oracle WebCenter (OWC) and "Beehive," the latest version of its groupware suite.

As always any Oracle acquisition raises the question of culture. (See our earlier discussion of Stellent). The AquaLogic team strikes me as much less buttoned-up than Oracle (they certainly don't dress the same), and its customers are fiercely independent. Those customers previously rebelled when dumped into the larger BEA World conference, which prompted the vendor to develop the separate AquaLogic event. I did not sense great enthusiasm for joining 43,000 other Oracle users at OpenWorld later this year. But I didn't sense panic either: everyone knows Oracle loves maintenance revenue, and there is a lot of that to be had among the AquaLogic product set. (Enterprise Portals)

Edited by CMSWatch yesterday at 11:02 pm GMT

(new) Vendor criticism of CMS Watch - As you know at CMS Watch we write critical product evaluations to help you avoid expensive procurement and deployment mistakes. We write reports that detail both the warts and merits of big vendors like EMC, Oracle, Xerox and IBM -- through to smaller specialist vendors like Hyland, Autonomy and Nuxeo. Readers of our reports often ask me "what did vendor x say when they read that!" The assumption, sometimes correct, is that vendors freak out on reading such criticism.

In an industry whereby most of the "independent analysts" are heavily dependent on revenues from the very firms they claim to be "independent" of, it's unusual to see truly critical research get published. So it becomes a surprise to both buyers and sellers when they read such criticism. In our reports we widely distribute the compliments and brickbats -- if something is truly terrible we will tell you.

But most of the time it is not a case of bad technology versus good technology. Rather it is a case of good fit versus bad fit: a product that could become an outstanding performer in a larger legal firm may make a terrible fit in a mid-sized manufacturing and ERP-centric environment. Hence we urge you the reader to study all the alternatives and balance them out, rather than look at one preferred vendor in isolation.

Speaking of isolation, the marketing groups of some vendors seem to operate in in a kind of vacuum. I guess it's part of the job for them to drink their own Kool Aid, but some of them seem to think it's part of their job to attack and stop any criticism of their product or company. At CMS Watch we're often on the receiving end of that wrath; that stinks sometimes, but so be it. Just as it is the vendor's job to wax lyrical about the joys of their product, so too is it ours to unearth the reality. If you want to get an insight into this particular dynamic, whether you're a curious end user or a vendor AR (Analyst Relations) person, check out the article I published today. (Enterprise Portals)

Edited by CMSWatch yesterday at 08:43 pm GMT

(new) Advice for vendors dealing with independent analysts - CMS Watch principal Alan Pelz-Sharpe takes a break from advising technology buyers to share a few bits of advice for vendors trying to influence independent analysts. Vendors are always trying to pitch "a story," and often fight vigorously to enforce a party line among analysts, but the real story, Alan argues, comes from the people who matter most: the technology customer... (ECM Suites)

Edited by CMSWatch yesterday at 08:19 pm GMT

(new) Omniture's Q1 results -- forecasting the future of analytics? - Omniture's Q1 2008 financial results were as rosy as ever, and after listening to a year's worth of earning's calls, the transcripts are almost interchangeable...higher revenues, higher profit margins, more sales reps, more upselling of Genesis partner services.

Omniture's product strategy is focused on providing options and services on integrating web data to both marketing and offline data, the logical next step for web analytics that we discussed in the first edition of the Web Analytics Report.

Yet, how much of the potential marketplace for analytics is actually going down the integration path? Is your organization doing this? Or, does integration simply mean linking web analytics with Google AdWords?

Omniture is a bellwether company in the web analytics industry, but one trying to execute on the promise of web analytics integration in order to sustain its growth. Other vendors are following the same strategy. This could well become the final frontier for traditional web analytics vendors.

In a market that is now 13 years old, web analytics is no longer in its infancy. It may in fact be plateauing in features that are of real importance. Now we'll see if customers can finally catch up and use the data to drive web value.

(Web Analytics)

Edited by CMSWatch yesterday at 09:41 am GMT

(new) DAM's growing pains - Digital Asset Management may not constitute a huge slice of the ECM pie, but it's a fast-growing slice. That was the consensus of several experts who spoke at the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management show in New York earlier this week. The generally accepted estimate is that the DAM market worldwide presently accounts for a yearly spend of between a third of a billion and half a billion dollars; and overall spending is increasing at the rate of twenty-something percent per year. If true (and one never knows...) that's a pretty healthy clip.

With any expanding technology there are bound to be "growing pains," and this is certainly true of DAM. In talking to vendor CEOs and CTOs, their customers, consultants, developers, fellow analysts, and other cognoscenti at the Henry Stewart conference, I heard certain concerns raised over and over again. I'll summarize the major ones quickly:

Silo proliferation: Many large enterprises have gotten to the point where multiple media repositories are being supported internally for multiple uses by multiple groups. Consolidating assets across a balkanized DAM landscape is often difficult for a variety of reasons. The challenge is to unify the media cloud with some sort of federation technology.

Media sharing across geographies: An organization headquartered in London has artists in Paris, editors in Montreal, and videographers in New York. How do the various offices collaborate on the processing of shared resources (including very large video files), without unacceptable latencies or bandwidth exhaustion?

Metadata handling: Which files, under what circumstances, should have XMP metadata embedded in them as opposed to being passed separately in a sidecar payload? How do you apply access control to metadata at the attribute or element level? How can you secure metadata against tampering (and detect tampering when it occurs)? How can you encrypt metadata so that unauthorized individuals who gain access to an asset can't see the metadata? If an asset with embedded metadata gets passed back and forth between DAMs, how do you keep one system from overwriting the metadata created by the other? (Ingestion rules may cause collisions.) These are just some of the metadata-related issues that "enterprise DAM" customers are struggling with.

Integration with enterprise systems: The typical DAM product was not designed with interoperability in mind and represents "yet another proprietary silo" in an IT environment. To address this, most vendors have added Web Service APIs to their DAM products. But as Jason Bright (founder and CEO of MediaBeacon) points out, all this does is open up a few peepholes into what's basically still a crazy-quilt of vendor-specific API methods. It doesn't really solve the problem.

Systems take too long to implement: Enterprise DAM projects are complex, expensive, and risky, typically involving a "cast of thousands" (many stakeholders), with a high potential for paralysis by analysis. Customers as well as vendors are desperate to improve the "time-to-value" proposition. This may account, in part, for the recent trend toward SaaS-based DAM. (North Plains Systems announced its entry into the SaaS fold at the Henry Stewart show this week.) Nevertheless, SaaS isn't for everyone, and DAM "in the large" requires serious research and advance planning, regardless of supplier model.

Of course, I should point out that you can shorten your research time considerably with the aid of The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008, our 275-page guide to the DAM market, containing no-nonsense evaluations of DAM and MAM products from 18 established vendors. (You can see a free online sample here.)

The challenges around Digital Asset Management are daunting and grow by the day. But the same can be said of the attendant opportunities. (Digital Asset Management)

Edited by CMSWatch yesterday at 12:26 am GMT

(new) Announcing the XML snd Component Content Management Report - It's been a busy month at CMS Watch. Today we announce the release of another evaluation report, The XML & Component Content Management Report 2008. Developed in conjunction with The Rockley Group, the report evaluates 14 component content management vendors and 5 XML editor tools. From today's release about the report:

"Component Content Management (CCM) technology allows enterprises to manage text content as componentized chunks of information rather than whole documents or web pages. It has become increasingly important to modern enterprises, especially given the rapid emergence of the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) standard. However, CCM technology remains largely the domain of a wide collection of smaller software vendors targeting narrower use cases..."

Subscribers will receive copy shortly; others can download a free sample here. (XML and Component Content Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 15

A caution about Drupal as a social software platform - The open source package Drupal is one of the few social publishing platforms built on top of a longstanding Web CM (WCM) system. It has a strong foundation with a very flexible taxonomy system which -- along with thousands of 3rd-party modules -- enables you to assemble social publishing applications.

However, these modules could be your biggest problem as well because many times, module upgrades do not keep pace with Drupal upgrades. Even though Drupal has released version 6.2, many of the more popular modules are still on 5.x. These include Organic groups (for building communities or groups), MySite (module for MyPage or MyYahoo type functionality), Panels (module for creating more flexible layouts) and Views (module for creating flexible lists of content) -- all modules that are necessary for building such social publishing applications.

Meanwhile, some of the problem related to 3rd-party modules could be reduced with the new firm Acquia announcing a commercial Drupal version which will include support for many of these 3rd party modules. Even though Acquia has received a bit of publicity (and VC funding), the first release of "Carbon" (its commercial offering) won't be released until the second half of this year.

So if you are planning to employ Drupal for your social software project, pay special attention to the modules that are required and test them thoroughly on Drupal. It is quite possible that you do not need any of these 3rd party modules because Drupal also includes many modules like Blog and Forums in its core. But if you do need external modules like these, your best bet would probably be to go for Drupal 5.x (and the same holds good for those looking to upgrade from 5.x to 6.x as well). As we continue to research social software in the enterprise, look for more details in these pages on Drupal and competing platforms. (Web Content Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 14

Thoughts on how to do your DAM homework - Yesterday at the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management & Marketing Operations Symposium in New York, I sat in on a DAM "best practices" talk given by onetime independent consultant Linda Tadic, now an Adjunct Professor at New York University teaching classes on digital archiving and related topics. As a former Manager of the digital library at HBO, Digital Projects Coordinator at J. Paul Getty Trust, and Director of Operations at ARTstor, Tadic has been involved first-hand in a number of large DAM system rollouts. She's learned some interesting lessons along the way. Here are a few quick takeaways from her talk:

"DAM isn't a system; it's a workflow." Don't think statically about a DAM system. It's not some cryogenic tank that you dump bits into for longterm storage. There are processes associated with every asset in the system.
"Allow six months for initial research." Don't even think you're going to initiate any kind of discussion with a DAM vendor within the first six months. You need to spend that time doing basic DAM research; identifying and talking to stakeholders; getting buy-in from sponsors; assessing your current situation with regard to assets, metadata, and IT resources; and so on. ("Take whatever time you've budgeted for initial research," said a panel member in an earlier session, "and just triple it.")

"Identify all of the different types of users you'll have." You need a taxonomy of users. Why? Because you can't begin to know your requirements until you understand who all the actors are that might use your system, and in what capacity they are going to use it. (Note that more than one speaker emphasized the need to write "user narratives" instead of, or in addition to, formal system requirements.)

"Interview users of all the different types you've identified." Develop personas. Capture them as user narratives.

"Metadata should contain information about the asset's chain of custody back to the beginning." For every asset, you want to be able to find out: Who created it? Who has owned it? Who owns it now?

"Granulate your metadata." Most metadata isn't fine-grained enough. You want to be able to run reports quickly and easily, without spending a lot of time parsing the metadata just to get at certain bits.

"Allow for the idea that you may need to restrict edit rights on metadata at the field level." This is difficult to do with most systems. But the key intuition is, you don't want someone who rightfully needs "write access" to one or two fields of the metadata to be able to overwrite all fields.

"Insist on owning any code produced by anybody who helped implement your system." Ditto for any documentation associated with the project.

All great advice.

(Digital Asset Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 13

Now more than ever, reading is not believing - As a content producer, it has been fascinating to watch the evolution of channels where technology suppliers talk to technology customers -- the trade press and industry conferences in particular.

Take conferences. In the go-go 1990s, prospective speakers were busy making money, and conference organizers (of which there were many!) aggressively courted panelists and often paid them to speak. During the last recession, most conferences stopped paying speakers (except for keynotes and training). In fact, in many venues the pendulum has shifted towards pay-to-play, and you see more exhibitors on conference panels than ever. Not surprisingly, when this happens the quality suffers apace.

The trade press has not been immune from this trend either. Still, I was shocked last week when a UK-based IT publication asked one of our analysts to pay the publisher to run an article that the magazine itself had solicited. This was not a "sponsored white paper," but a regular article in a regular trade publication. Everyone knows the 4th Estate has fallen on hard times, but I didn't realize it was that bad, and in any case one would hope that basic ethics don't get lost amid shifting business models.

I think these trends reflect a broader phenomenon: There is more marketing money than ever chasing finite buyer attention. You see it at conferences that are longer on exhibitors than attendees. And webpages that are longer on ads than content. We've written previously on the substantial conflicts of interest baked into traditional analyst industry models.

What does all this mean for you the customer? It means you need to be more skeptical than ever. At some level you already knew that, but it's possible that your colleagues helping you to make technology choices do not. That's why you need to hard-wire careful, hands-on testing into any software procurement. Surely, there are products and vendors out there that really could offer a good fit for your needs. But in the end, experience really is the best selector.

We think doing proper advance homework is essential, or we wouldn't sell evaluation reports for a living. But now more than ever, you need to trust your own judgments. Base those judgments more on actions than words. (Web Content Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 13

Facebook: Not just a toy... - Over the last few years, many people (including us) have asked whether or not Facebook can be used as a enterprise intranet. Many have dismissed this notion by stating that Facebook is really just a time-wasting toy. While that question continues to be debated in enterprises across the globe, there is no question that Facebook has caught the attention of the big boys -- namely Google and Microsoft.

We have been hearing of Facebook as a drain on Google resources for some time. When asked about the biggest challenge to Google's success, one Google employee we talked to indicated that it was the loss of talent to nearby Facebook. It's not surprising that employees would be attracted to move down the street from Mountain View to Palo Alto to find a similar collegiate, yet pre-IPO, culture; but now the defections are becoming more senior, and more strategic. Facebook's COO, VP of Global Communications, Director of Business Development, Director of Platform Product Marketing are all ex-Google employees.

In the midst of Facebook's talent threat to Google, the company has also piqued the interest of Microsoft as a way to challenge Google themselves. As Prescient Digital Media's Toby Ward points out, Microsoft may look to Facebook's platform as a way to tap into the hosted enterprise tool market where Google has found success.

I agree with Toby that the Facebook platform certainly has a ways to go to truly compete head to head with Google's current offerings, but Microsoft's interest should indicate that Facebook has some major strategic value. The platform, the 70 million users, and the ever-growing ex-Google experience, are all assets that would strengthen Microsoft's arsenal in these early stages of a possible showdown between Microsoft and Google. Clearly, Facebook is much more than just a toy.

Next week, I will be moderating a panel discussion on this and other Facebook in the Enterprise questions at the Enterprise3 conference in San Diego. The panel will be comprised of the previously mentioned President of Prescient Digital Media, Toby Ward; Serena Software's VP of Communications, Kyle Arteaga; and the Senior Director of Optaros Labs at Optaros, John Eckman. Please join us for what should be a very lively discussion. (Enterprise Portals)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 12

DAM: Always the bridesmaid, never the bride? - As the Henry Stewart DAM Conference kicks off in New York City today, CMS Watch has quite a bit to say about the state of the DAM industry, based on our research for the recently released Digital Asset Management Report 2008.

As we discuss in our press release, despite the continued "on-the-cusp" feel of the DAM industry, it has yet to explode. And, frankly, we question if it ever will. DAM's growth has been more like that of a trusty, stable bond investment than a late-'90s software stock. All the better, perhaps, if DAM grows slowly but surely, even if it's a bit in the shadows.

We'll blog more on the themes from our report, and this week's conference, in the coming days.

(Digital Asset Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 12

SEO: furthering the case for better content hygiene - The worlds of SEO and enterprise search are not as far apart as you might think. Let me explain. Along with my colleague Alan, I had the pleasure of attending the upbeat Internet World UK conference earlier this month in London. What I enjoy most about attending such large, diverse events is going to sessions about technologies related to, but not directly about, the technologies I cover -- and so I found myself attending numerous sessions on SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

Though there was an inquisitive crowd present for my talk, the topic I spoke about -- enterprise search -- is much lower on the totem pole for e-marketers (the principal attendees at this event) than SEO. A few showed up, in fact, wanting to better understand the nuances of website search vs. enterprise search vs. SEO. Are there universal things we can do to simultaneously improve all things, I was asked? Indeed. Despite the differences in searching the web, searching within your enterprise, and making your own website more findable by search engines, many of the same best practices apply.

As readers of The Enterprise Search Report know, good content hygiene is essential to good search results. Consistent content structure, metadata, and simple things like clear and meaningful document titles all help search engines work better -- be they the public (e.g., Google) website, or enterprise kind. But in most cases, content managers don't know where to start with their clean-up: it's an often overwhelming task. As such, content clean-up continues to get cast aside ("too much work"), and search technology vendors make it seem that much less important when they promote technology as the panacea to content woes. Don't believe it for a second.

A few more tidbits from the event:

These days, 80% of e-commerce transactions start with a web search, says Dan Cohen, Head of SEO for MSN UK.
The #1 hindrance to SEO is poor content and code (which also highly contributes to poor web and intranet search results)
Creating clear, topic-related content "hubs" on your web site is the next most important thing for SEO
As readers of our Web Analytics Report know, analytics should be a core part of your e-marketing pie, to get a clear picture of what your customers are looking for and where they're getting stuck.

Bottom line: cleaning up your content can improve your website search results and your Google ranking. (Enterprise Search)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 10

Imaging - the most important element of ECM? - As an "Enterprise-focused" content management analyst, I am asked two basic questions on a regular basis. The first (which I shan't speak of further here) is "what about SharePoint?" The second is, "what about imaging?"

At many conferences, and regularly via e-mail, people ask me about imaging in the context of ECM. Imaging is the the major cost that most projects either forget about or dramatically under budget for. Partly this is due to the fact that during the buying process it's all too easy to get caught up in the flurry of believing that every file will soon be digital. Even though paper is clearly here to stay.

So before you fall into that trap let me offer you a few words of advice. Firstly, dealing with the "backfile" of paper documents may well be the most costly and difficult part of your entire ECM project. Though you almost certainly do not need to capture and convert all the paper, the very task of identifying what is important to convert and what is not, is labor intensive in its own right. Secondly, the scanner is the least of your concerns. The cost and complexity of capture do lie not in hardware. Rather, your bigger expense will come in the form or software -- software that processes the captured image, indexes it, and puts it through quality controls, and (in many cases) extracts data elements and instigates workflows. Thirdly, recognize that capture and imaging will likely always be a part of the ECM process; you can try to eliminate it, but you will likely fail. So address it early on.

To many customers, particularly IT buyers, Imaging and Capture seem dull and uninteresting. It's not sexy like WCM or DAM are supposed, yet it is typically much higher cost, and typically more of a challenge to install, test, run and support. On the other hand, imaging is also where almost immediate process change and potential cost savings can be seen and calculated.

Imaging remains big business, which is why the likes of Oracle, IBM and EMC are so serious about developing these capabilities. It's why web oriented firms like Vignette cling hard to their (acquired) imaging legacy solutions, it's why specialists like Hyland and Laserfiche continue to thrive in turbulent markets.

And it's why you the buyer should prioritize imaging budgets and concerns early in your project and procurement process. Remember at core ECM systems typically consist of 3 core subsystems: library services, imaging, and workflow. Those are the same 3 core technology blocks that existed in the earliest document management systems, and it is those core technologies that continue to dominate the market, regardless of SharePoint. (ECM Suites)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 10

Maria, why is your portal so mean to me? - A CMS Watch customer implementing Liferay Portal sent me this screenshot below. On the whole, the implementation is going well enough, but the abrupt tone of some of the error messages is turning off early community testers.

liferay error messages

Of course, cryptic and even rude error messages are famously the bane of many software applications, and at least the Liferay messages include the magic word "please" after telling you that you screwed up. Thing is, when the software in question serves developers, the vendor gets a lot of direct blowback, but when the software serves business users, there is typically an intermediary at the customer who suffers first.

For example, behind every portal project lies the portal project manager. Let's say her name is Maria. Maria may be leading a Liferay (or IBM, or Oracle, or Jetspeed or whatever) implementation, but end users don't know and probably don't care which tool is getting deployed. To them, it's Maria's portal. And they will ask, "Maria, why is your portal so mean to me?"

Maria will of course try to make the error messages friendlier and more meaningful. But her developers explain that this part of the portal remains undocumented, and the messages appear to be system generated. That's not a good answer, because even though the codebase is open source, Maria has been around the block enough to know that sending her developers off on a wild goose chase to track down, modify, and recompile some part of the platform is asking for trouble later. So, Maria appeals to the original portal developers and the broader community, but doesn't get a satisfactory reply. Fixing error messages joins the to-do list for Maria's Portal, version two.

Of course, the very same set of events could have transpired if Maria's firm had gone with a commercial portal product, but somehow I think that certain open source projects are particularly vulnerable here -- especially those where contributors get their props and cred for the features they develop, rather than the usability they engender.

As Enteprise Portals Report readers know, Liferay the company (center of Liferay the open source project) pretty much falls into that category. Liferay is a somewhat distractable and hyperkinetic firm that seems rather more interested in putting out cool modules than debugging them. Again: I know many commercial vendors with the same profile. As always, test first, and ye shall find... (Enterprise Portals)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 9

Routing around potholes in the DAM road - In an earlier post, prompted by my recent involvement as co-lead analyst (with Theresa Regli) on The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008, I commented on a few areas in which DAM and MAM vendors seem to have mastered some content management principles that Web CMS vendors (who tend, by and large, to be a bit younger than their DAM counterparts) perhaps shouldn't have to reinvent or discover on their own. Things like capturing metadata on every item that goes into a repository, and storing that metadata as tables in a relational database where the data can easily be queried, mined, and managed.

DAM vendors may have gotten some important things right, but in certain areas there's a great deal of catch-up left to do. I'll comment briefly on a couple of those areas: workflow and reporting. Bear in mind, these remarks don't apply to every vendor; there are exceptions.

One area where DAM offerings tend (surprisingly often) to come up short, out of the box, is workflow. In speaking with DAM licensees, I found this to be one of the most frequently voiced complaints. ("We liked everything but their workflow system.") What's particularly striking about this shortcoming is that asset management tends to be more process-intensive, while most web publishing scenarios only require relatively simple approval workflows.

Nevertheless, Web CMS vendors seem to have figured out that the process of making content consumable is indeed a process that sometimes needs to accommodate well understood flow-control rules, actors with definite roles, time-out and retry policies, logging, error-handling, and at least some degree of administrative oversight (so that in-progress workflows can be monitored and obsolete or orphaned workflow instances can be killed). More fundamentally, a workflow is something that can be modeled. Most DAM offerings have no real understanding of that.

Much of what masquerades as workflow in the DAM world is simply e-mail-based reminder routing (with no real state management). There's seldom any formal support for fan-out, fan-in, role-based delegation, retry policies, quorum constraints, escalation, or rollback. DAM customers who need something more robust than simple e-mail chaining typically find themselves having to integrate a third-party workflow solution, or else build a custom solution. Either way, it means significant added cost.

Meanwhile, reporting and auditing facilities also remain incredibly weak in many DAM products. (Of course, as Web CMS Report readers know, quite a few WCMS offerings are guilty here too.) You would think that a product that comes with a versioning subsystem would offer file check-out history views, but even that kind of rudimentary reporting capability is frequently missing from DAM systems. Likewise, "auditing" often turns out to be nothing more than event-logging. The ability to dump log data to an Excel file frequently gets touted as a "convenience" -- sorry folks: it's not.

There are a couple of quick takeaways here for prospective DAM (and WCM) licensees. First, don't confuse team-based collaboration (no matter how cleverly supported) with workflow. If you need to be able to model what you're doing and launch auditable instances of it, you need bona fide workflow support. Decide up front whether that's what you in fact need, and if so, don't let a demo-god convince you that an ad hoc notification system with "approval" written all over it constitutes workflow.

Likewise, understand that event logging is not synonymous with auditing and reporting (any more than data is the same thing as information). Consider your reporting and auditing needs in the context of your workflow needs; security requirements; the "turnover" characteristics of your content (and user population); and corporate accountability (governance) requirements. Also consider the degree to which you might need real-time monitoring capability in addition to offline or time-shifted reporting.

When it comes to workflow and reporting, don't assume that the basic functionality that should be in a product will be in it. In the DAM world, that's all too often not the case, and you'll need to budget for it.

Those are just a couple of quick thoughts. For a much more detailed discussion of these (and other) issues, with an in-depth look at how some of the best-known DAM and MAM vendors address (or fail to address) these points in their currently shipping offerings, be sure to consult The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008. You can find a free sample here. (Digital Asset Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 8

Coremetrics releases ad hoc analysis functionality - The recently concluded eMetrics Summit was somewhat quiet on the vendor front except for the Coremetrics announcement of its Spring 2008 release featuring ad hoc query functionality in its new offering, "Explore."

This now gives Coremetrics a competitive offering to Omniture Discover and WebTrends Market Intelligence.

More advanced users of Coremetrics will likely be pleased. As Web Analytics Report readers know, one of the major pain points among customers seeking deeper-dive analysis was needing to go through account managers to run custom queries and potentially have to wait a long time to get results. If Explore works as billed, it will mitigate that problem.

I've always thought that Coremetrics did a decent job at creating out-of-the-box reports that address the needs of marketers and less sophisticated analysts. While they have lagged their competitors in offering a strong ad-hoc analysis tool, another way of looking at it could be that they have been tracking their customers learning curve more accurately...and now they believe there is enough analytics maturity among their client base to actually use a deeper analytics tool.

If this is the case, it represents a different approach than what has often characterized web analytics..."a build it and they will be sold" strategy that provides tools that are too sophisticated and challenging for the customer base to use effectively. As you review web analytics software -- as you would any technology -- make sure not to over-buy something you don't know how to use. (Web Analytics)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 8

Innovations in Digital Asset Management, Circa 2008 - The Digital Asset Management (DAM) marketplace doesn't receive a lot of attention, but DPCI's Joseph Bachana argues that some very interesting developments are transpiring. The problem is, no single vendor has a lock on how to combine all these innovations into a comprehensive offering... (Digital Asset Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 8

Announcing The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008 - I'm thrilled to announce the launch of The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008. While we've followed DAM and blogged quite a bit about DAM and MAM (Media Asset Management) over our 7-year history, this report represents our first comprehensive comparative evaluation of 18 DAM tools, and our first aggregation of DAM and MAM best practices.

Subscribers, you'll be getting your copy shortly; others can download a free sample here.

For several evaluations of major enterprise DAM vendors (Open Text's Artesia, Interwoven's MediaBin, EMC's Documentum Digital Asset Manager, and the IBM FileNet / Ancept Media Server pairing), we built on the foundational DAM research in our ECM Suites Report 2008. We then looked at several pure-play DAM vendors, including ClearStory, North Plains, Canto, WAVE, Widen, and ADAM. You can see the full list of vendors covered here.

As always, the core of our research centers on talking with customers, the real everyday users of DAM systems. Our goal is to cut through the marketing hype and report people's real-world experience with the tools, and help you, the buyer and implementer, understand which tools are most appropriate for which situations. As with all the technologies we cover, the DAM industry has seen many failed or abandoned investments because of poor product selection or implementation practices. We want you to go into your product selection and implementation with full knowledge of a product's strengths and weaknesses.

My fellow DAM analyst Kas Thomas and I will blog a lot more about DAM and MAM in the coming months. We both had a great time putting this report together, as it's a rather fun and sexy technology. We also hope to see you at the Henry Stewart DAM Symposium in New York City next week; my Wednesday tutorial, "Sorting Out the Content Technology Marketplace," will present an overview of this new research, along with some of our latest ECM and WCM findings, as well. (Digital Asset Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 7

Reinventing the Java application server - Just when you thought the Java application server market was pretty well saturated (if not in actual decline), along comes a brand new entrant with familiar-sounding promises of "lighter, faster, easier." What's doubly ironic is that this new contender comes from the very folks who've done so much (intentionally or not) to make "Java appserver" a bad name in recent years. I'm talking about the people at SpringSource (purveyors of the celebrated Spring Framework).

The newly announced SpringSource Application Platform is (according to its creators) "a completely module-based Java application server that is designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a new degree of flexibility and reliability." Spring geeks will recognize it as the long-awaited integration of Spring with OSGi.

Source: www.springsource.com

OSGi, by way of background, is a fairly mature specification (dating to 1999) encompassing a dynamic component model in which Java classes are deployed as bundles, which are in turn registered as services within the OSGi execution environment. The OSGi framework provides automatic versioning, dependency resolution, and secure "find and bind" functionality such that bundles can discover and safely call the right versions of each other. (Think of it as a kind of SOA microcosm inside a running JVM.)

The real value-add of OSGi comes in terms of lifecycle management of classes, cleaner isolation of code, and more thoroughgoing code reuse. With OSGi, there's no need for every deployed web app to hide its own copy of xalan.jar (or whatever) under WEB-INF, as so often happens on J2EE appservers. A bundle gets exposed once, and the various apps that need to use that code can do so without getting caught in classloader hell.

More interesting is that bundles can be hot-swapped without breaking any running apps. You can update part of an app (just the bundles that need updating) without disturbing the rest of the app or having to bounce the server.

There are other benefits as well, but efficient code reuse and the ability to hot-swap code modules are core to what OSGi is about. Which may explain why WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss, Jonas, and others are moving to (or already have moved to) OSGi-based architectures.

What (if anything) makes SpringSource Application Platform better than any of the other OSGi-enabled app servers? On a purely technical level, SSAP tends to expose low-level OSGi internals more directly, for developers who want programmatic access to OSGi-based magic. (Other appservers tend to hide OSGi's innards.) Also, SSAP is more flexible with regard to deployment options. And (oh yes), it uses Spring.

Still, there's a down side to all the wonderfulness. New programming patterns are in play with OSGi (representing a new learning curve for developers), and overall complexity has not gone down; it has merely been shifted around. Also, some people are put off by the project's GPLv3 license. (Spring itself will continue to use the Apache license, however.)

Our take? The OSGi-powered SpringSource Application Platform represents an important paradigm shift, one that has the potential to revitalize Java EE development (much as Spring itself did when it debuted on the first day of Spring in 2004). How? By raising expectations around code reuse, serviceability, reliability, remote management, hot upgrades that don't break anything, version-based conflict resolution, and other difficult issues that (frankly) have long needed solving in order for Java EE development to go to the next level.

For people who implement, customize, maintain, upgrade, and/or administer Java-based content management systems, the potential payoffs of OSGi are many. Note that the WCMS vendors best positioned (in theory, at least) to benefit from the new paradigm are those already using Spring, such as Alfresco, CoreMedia, Enonic, and Hannon Hill. Mind you, it's not a given that any vendor currently using Spring will migrate to the SpringSource Application Platform. But it's definitely something to watch for. We'll be following the situation closely; and we intend to let you know what "develops." (Web Content Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 6

Mediasurface for sale? - I've been hearing various rumors recently about mid-market Web CMS vendors up for sale. If true, you could imagine all sort of marketplace shifts (both good and bad) causing ownership stakes to start moving. Certainly one toolset in play is Serena Collage. Almost all these vendors are privately traded, so such rumors are...just that.

But one WCM vendor, UK-based Mediasurface, trades publicly (on the "alternative investment market" of LSX), and quietly had to explain a recent stock bump. I say "quietly" because we only got wind via an investor-blogger, who first mentioned a company communication (pdf) -- a statement that remains more or less hidden in the investor-relations area of the Mediasurface website. In the short memo, Mediasurface "...notes the recent share price and announces that it has received a preliminary approach, which may or may not lead to an offer for the Company."

In recent years Mediasurface has grown -- a bit haphazardly we thought -- via acquisition, but evidently failed to control costs, and a surprise announcement (pdf) of losses late last year sent the stock tumbling from around 25p to languish at about 5p per share, at least until this latest courtship. You can track the stock price here.

If consummated, a match with "a UK company that does not compete directly with Mediasurface" might not be a bad thing for the vendor's customers. Like direct competitor Tridion (sold to SDL earlier this year), Mediasurface has global ambitions, and sometimes global reach, but struggled a bit beyond its regional base. As Web CMS Report 2008 readers know, Mediasurface's flagship Morello product suffers from a rather dated back-end, but the company has innovated enough on features to keep it interesting even for larger buyers. Things may start to get even more interesting soon. (Web Content Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 6

Budget time: How much should I set aside for software licenses? - When budget-building time comes up, many technology customers face the interesting question of how much money to put aside for new software licenses. Even without looking at specific vendors, you might have to tell your manager some ballpark figure for expected license costs.

As an analyst I'm frequently asked about license prices. A recent interesting discussion among peers challenged my views and provided helpful feedback that might assist you in arriving at the right numbers in today's marketplace:

List prices aside, buyers can presently obtain significant discounts on enterprise portals and on Web CMS tools. This may be caused by the increased SharePoint infiltration. A commentary in February on big software discounts and recent numbers from Vignette seems to confirm this trend. SharePoint licensing for websites is the exception that proves the rule. In general if the Web CMS comes from an ECM vendor, it will be more expensive -- potentially way more expensive

With enterprise search at the high end, the reverse is true. The marketplace is seeing strong demand at the moment. Many enterprise-tier search offerings come only as a bundled offering, so there is little list pricing to benchmark against. Deals quickly run into the millions of Euros in large, global, and complex enterprises.

Among the huge array of mid-market vendors across different content technologies -- many them local/regional in footprint -- you can typically find solutions that meet the needs of even organization-wide deployments in most enterprises, but at a factor of five (or more) cheaper than the higher-end solutions

If you are willing to serve as a reference client or appear on the customer list -- or better within a press release -- this is very valuable for the vendor and should help you to get significant discounts. (And of course as you look to evaluate vendors and they provide such testimonials, you should also understand how this game is played.)

Remember that enterprise deals entail complex negotiation and pricing models that ultimately boil down to what the salesperson thinks you can afford. Perhaps needless to say, but still: Implementation costs are higher than licensing costs and open source projects are not necessarily cheaper just because you might save licensing costs.

Thanks to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Apoorv Durga, James Robertson and Martin White. (Enterprise Portals)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 4

So you say you want collaboration? - Everybody wants improved collaboration, but how, and towards what end? Or as we asked quite intently in our SharePoint Report 2008, what kind of collaboration?

Those questions came to mind during Martin White's keynote at the Intracom 2008 conference (which was quite vibrant, btw) in Québec, PQ, Canada earlier this week.

Martin White at IntraCom 2008

Martin's keynote offered many gems, including several cautions about social software in multilingual environments. Most social software applications assume the primacy (and at some level even the replacement) of written communication over oral. This of course raises all sorts of cultural issues, but perhaps more importantly: non-native speakers who may comfortably listen and speak in a second or third tongue may not feel proficient enough to write in a foreign language. Of course, sometimes the opposite is true. But the broader point -- that electronic collaboration systems can redistribute interaction patterns in a potentially random way -- still stands.

The part of the keynote that particularly interested me was Martin's description of different kinds of teams: communities of practice; formal workgroups; project-specific teams; informal networks. Each has its own rhythms and needs.

And what are those teams actually doing? Well, there are different types of collaborative tasks, ranging from problem-solving, resource-sharing, status-tracking, and quite a bit more.

This analysis might seem obvious, but I think is terribly important, because it gets to the heart of collaboration / social software when that technology assumes the broader mantle of "Enterprise 2.0." At an enterprise level (and beyond) you will find quite diverse collaboration and networking requirements. The smart enterprise invests in finding out what its employees' really need, and will actually use, before investing heavily in new tools. (SharePoint)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 3

Content Management - UK vs US - On a flight back to Boston from London yesterday I took a little time to digest what I had observed during the past week in the UK. It was an odd week really, and somewhat disconcerting as the contrast between the US and the UK was quite stark.

First, it must be said that there was no sign of a recession or downturn in the content management industry in the UK. The doom and gloom we hear daily from all and sundry in North America is not echoed across the Atlantic. Far from it. People across the board that we met talked of project growth, and vendors boast of business improving quarter on quarter. Of course, part of this could be that I was attending a web-oriented conference, and WCM has remained frothy around the globe, in this recession as in the past. But still, the mood in London was unusually upbeat.

Second, it seems clear that the vendor landscape and the channel landscape is becoming ever more regional. Of the 300 plus vendors at Internetworld, only a small fraction were from North America. In the past North American vendors dominated events, but not any more.

Third, there is a real appetite for governance and strategy consulting in the UK. Buyers appear to be aware that content technologies change business practices, that content needs to be managed...and that software cannot do that for you.

Fourth, the need to create multilingual sites and manage multilingual content is far more acute in the UK and continental Europe than the US. Be that Hindi, Gujarati, or Punjabi in the UK -- or French, German, and Italian in Switzerland -- the skills to do this are honed, the solutions found, and the workflows better understood.

I don't really know why there is such a stark difference between the two markets. It's not new really, it was evident in 2007 and 2006, but it appears to be getting more acute and the divisions widening at a faster pace. One factor is probably an overall more positive and optimistic economy in the UK, but there are other industry-specific things to consider.

Very high-speed internet access in Britain is typically faster and more widespread than in the US. Many homes in the UK have faster connections than typical SMEs in the US (8mbps is common in UK homes). Greater bandwidth has allowed companies to exploit rich media and more complex websites more effectively than their US peers. There is greater advancement of 3G cellular phone technologies, and interactive television services, and these have provided a welcome challenge to content developers and publishers to exploit.

Greater adoption of standards across the EU have by definition fostered greater interconnectivity at the network, device, and delivery levels - and have also provided more suitable benchmarks to purchase against. Take for instance the MOREQ 2 specification for records management, a standard that is both practical and designed for general usage, as opposed to DOD 5015 that is a somewhat over-engineered military specification. Consider also the universal adoption of shared cellular networks, and device portability across providers -- as opposed to the confusion of competing networks and proprietary devices in the US.

At the procurement level can also see slower buying cycles and greater attention to vendor intangibles the UK paying off in the long run. Historically, (though there are many exceptions) purchasers of technology in Europe have taken longer to come to decisions, but then also stick with their chosen technology supplier for much longer than their US counterparts. It means that there is time to develop, test, and really get to know a product over time - and ultimately to use it to its maximum potential.

Of course all is not rosy in the UK. Big customers still get ripped off by big vendors; projects crash and burn, and all the problems we know about here in the US are encountered regularly there too. But there is certainly something to be learned from the UK's experiences. If you are in the process of buying Content Technology you should of course always ask for and follow through on customer references. It might well be a good idea to ask for specific UK references to be provided. Particularly if you have multi-lingual, governance, or mobile web issues to address. It may well be that they can give you better insights than colleagues in the US.

Recessions come and go, and economics is like political polling; since it is the most inexact of sciences, the experts usually get it wrong. However, we are in the midst of gloomy times here in America, and rather than get envious of our friends across the Atlantic, we can potentially turn the gloomy times to our benefit. (Web Content Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 2

Content Management - UK vs. US - On a flight back to Boston from London yesterday I took a little time to digest what I had observed during the past week in the UK. It was an odd week really, and somewhat disconcerting as the contrast between the US and the UK was quite stark.

At the procurement level, one can also see slower buying cycles and greater attention to vendor intangibles the UK paying off in the long run. Historically, (though there are many exceptions) purchasers of technology in Europe have taken longer to come to decisions, but then also stick with their chosen technology supplier for much longer than their US counterparts. It means that there is time to develop, test, and really get to know a product over time - and ultimately to use it to its maximum potential.

Edited by CMSWatch on May 2

uPortal 3: The long wait is over for a major release - When JA-SIG announced Version 3.0 of uPortal in mid-April, it marked the ending of a very long development cycle for the higher education enterprise portal. The initial milestone was announced way back in April 2005, and since then the small development team has continued work on the new major release.

Version 3.0 is mainly a technology release, but also ships with a fresher user interface and updated default content for better demonstrations. On the technology side the product now has improved portlet support (ready for JSR 286), a new unified caching framework as well as it has migrated to using the Spring development framework.

As readers of the Enterprise Portals Report know, uPortal is comparatively feature-thin, and its platform-like complexity sometimes comes as a surprise to developers expecting a simpler product. To facilitate the upgrade for existing adopters, uPortal ships with a wide set of import/export scripts, but as always make sure to test carefully before taking the plunge...

(Enterprise Portals)

Edited by CMSWatch on May 1

EMC's best-kept secret: Documentum financial performance - It's hard to know how Documentum is doing these days, now that it's been assimilated into EMC (the $32 billion ILM colossus). EMC, of course, does not break out detailed financials on Documentum, instead rolling the numbers up under "Content Management and Archiving." The latter division includes (among other things) the 15 or so document-capture and ILM products that are sold under the Captiva name. (Recall that EMC acquired Captiva in 2006 for $275 million.)

In the aggregate, the CMA product catalog accounted for $773 million in revenue for EMC in 2007 and $185 million in Q1 of 2008. The latter number is up approximately 8 percent from the same period a year earlier. On the surface, a nice performance.

Under the surface, things are a bit murkier. CMA license revenue slipped in Q1 of 2008, to $58.6 million, from $68.5 million for Q1 of 2007. But compared to the previous quarter's performance, the slip was huge: Q4 of 2007 saw CMA license revenues come in at $115.3 million (after trending upwards all year).

It should be noted that software license revenues were down across the board, for all business units except VMware, in Q1 2008 versus the previous quarter and the previous year. (Software maintenance revenue, on the other hand, is up across the board.) The biggest license-revenue upset by far, however, came in CMA, Documentum's business unit.

In EMC's Q1 2008 earnings call (the transcript of which is available from SeekingAlpha.com), Documentum is never mentioned by name. The sole reference to the "D6 platform" came when company CFO David Goulden said: "During the quarter we saw good demand for our D6 platform, particularly internationally, and the business pipeline is strong. The lumpiness in our Content Management business this quarter was partly due to timing of some deals and partly due to some of our own execution challenges, which impacted the quarter's license growth."

It's hard to know what it all means. But a 50 percent plunge in license revenue, quarter over quarter, is never good, no matter what the reason(s) behind it. It bears watching, which is what we will continue to do. (ECM Suites)

Edited by CMSWatch on Apr. 30

Mortgage crisis: The least of Vignette's worries - Vignette announced its first-quarter numbers last week, and the results weren't pretty. For the first three months of 2008, the company lost $839,000 (down sharply from the $4.8 million earned in the same period a year before). The poor performance was due in part to a severe drop in license revenue, down 37 percent for the quarter (to a little under $10 million) compared to Q1 of 2007, continuing the trend we reported on last January.

Company president Mike Aviles, in the earnings call of April 23, confirmed what we've long suspected, which is that Vignette suffers from an agility problem: The company is slow to innovate, and has trouble taking its innovations to market on a timely basis. "We're late," Aviles said in response to a question about time-to-market. "As an innovator in the marketplace, [Web 2.0] is something we should have been on years ago . . . But over many years I think we lost an edge at Vignette that we are now starting to get back." Still, Aviles candidly admitted: "The bottom line is we did not execute. We are not making any excuses for it."

Aviles noted that the recent turmoil in the financial services industry has been disruptive to Vignette's business. (Financial services has historically constituted an important vertical for Vignette.) If indeed the sub-prime loan crisis is partly to blame for Vignette's woes, it could be a troubling portent for the likes of Day Software and Terminal Four, who also do significant amounts of business with customers in the financial services industry. It's certainly a trend worth watching.

In any event, we think Vignette's troubles are probably larger than any temporary tumult in the banking industry (or even in the U.S. economy). Vignette's product release cycles are long. Its sales force seems unfocused. The company is under pricing pressure (something CFO Pat Kelly admitted in the earnings call). And as CEO Mike Aviles himself suggested, Vignette is not the bastion of innovation it once was.

Vignette is hopeful that its (not yet completed) acquisition of online-video-technology company Vidavee will help get innovation jump-started again. Whether it will succeed remains to be determined. We're watching closely. Stay tuned. (Web Content Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on Apr. 30

Archived SharePoint Webinar - If you couldn't make the "Evaluating SharePoint from a Business Perspective" webinar we conducted last week in conjunction with the folks running the Enterprise³ conference, you can review an archived version online here (for a couple of weeks, anyway). Questions, comments, criticisms welcome; just e-mail me. (SharePoint)

Edited by CMSWatch on Apr. 30

What WCM can learn from DAM - Having spent a great deal of time in recent weeks talking to vendors, consultants, and customers in the Digital Asset Management space (in preparing for the upcoming release of our Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008), it occurs to me that the Web CMS world could perhaps learn a few things from the DAM world.

Established DAM vendors tend, surprisingly often, to be older than the most established Web CMS vendors (predating the Web itself, in some cases). This fact, coupled with the demanding scalability, storage, network-bandwidth, and other requirements of the DAM domain, have given DAM vendors a unique perspective on what it means to manage content.

In the Web CMS world, "content" tends (broadly speaking) to be something that has the potential to convey information. In the DAM world, content is a bit more abstract: it's something with value, hence an asset. The distinction is subtle but important. In DAM, a piece of content does not become an asset until it has been classified, indexed, versioned, secured, stored, possibly reformatted or canonicalized in some way, and (typically) assigned a lifecycle state, a unique ID, and an owner. These are the things that make a piece of content an asset.

What's the key to making it all work? Metadata. In the DAM world, it's what you know about an object that makes the object findable and reusable, thus valuable. These days, it's not unusual for unstructured content to come with its own embedded metadata (in the form of XMP, say), but the general assumption in DAM is that any object, of any kind, regardless of whether it has its own embedded metadata, regardless of whether it's structured or not, should be enlistable as an asset in the system. If an asset comes into the system totally bereft of metadata, information about the object will be extracted, either from the object directly (via rules created beforehand) or from the person who uploaded the object, manually. DAM offerings vary greatly in sophistication with regard to metadata handling, but the point is, nothing gets into a DAM system without some kind of metadata association.

Something else DAM vendors seem to have figured out is that there should be at most one authoritative copy of an asset ("the truth"), from which all other renditions and copies are derived; and the one true copy should live on a file system, whereas the metadata associated with that asset should live in a relational database. "File system" can mean one or more file servers, and/or Network Attached Storage. The noteworthy point is that assets are unpredictable as to size and structure, hence are a poor impedance match for RDBMS storage, whereas they are a good match for a file system.

Keeping metadata in a database, on the other hand, means you can manage information about files separately from the files themselves. You can manage metadata security separately from asset security. You can run sophisticated queries and stored procedures against metadata stored in tables; and you get to enjoy all the advantages of a modern RDBMS in terms of ACID transactions, connection pooling, familiar reporting and data-mining tools, the ability to integrate with other systems, and well-understood best practices around capacity planning, clustering, performance tuning, data backup, and so forth. Metadata tends to be compact and very highly structured, hence is a good match for a relational database (particularly an XML database).

If there's a larger point to be learned here, it's that Web CMS vendors (and their customers) are frequently not thinking abstractly enough about the 'C' in CMS. Content can have structure or not have it. It can be textual or binary. It can be anything. It's what you know about it (and how you manage what you know about it) that matters. Even if your website is mostly text, you can't really depend on your search engine to attach the appropriate meaning to it.

The upshot? Look for Web CMS vendors to add stronger metadata-handling capabilities to their products over the coming 12 to 18 months. The more aggressive vendors will build text-analytics tools into their WCMS products or partner with (perhaps even acquire) text-analytics companies. We can also expect to begin hearing more (much more) about the use of XMP not just in conjunction with media files and PDFs but a wide variety of file types that you wouldn't necessarily expect to be associated with XMP.

And if you're a prospective Web CMS buyer? Give careful consideration to how the products on your short-list deal with capturing, storing, and managing metadata — for all types of files. (Look to Part 3 of our Web CMS Report 2008 for further thoughts on this.) Metadata isn't just for media any more.

(Web Content Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on Apr. 26

Thoughts on SharePoint and FAST Search - In our SharePoint Report 2008 we discuss SharePoint's shortcomings and strengths in the search space. While SharePoint 2007's search capabilities have been improved over the 2003 product, it's still not "enterprise class" for a variety of different reasons.

Clearly Microsoft saw this same shortcoming (both in SharePoint and it's overall search offerings) and announced that they were going to acquire enterprise search vendor FAST Search and Transfer (more information on FAST can be found in our Enterprise Search Report 2008).

For SharePoint users, this brings up a few opportunities and issues. In a previous blog post about the SharePoint conference, I highlighted the presentation that FAST employees gave. This presentation showed nifty new Silverlight-enabled search Web Parts. These Web Parts demonstrated several capabilities that FAST brings to the SharePoint world, like: content spotlighting, multimedia search, and taxonomy management.

The last capability is one that I believe would be particularly interesting for SharePoint users, since taxonomy management represents a challenging area for most SharePoint implementations -- SharePoint taxonomies are very rigidly based on physical structure of the SharePoint sites and leave little flexibility for a more logical taxonomic structure (Redmond folks would argue that the content query Web Part might help, but it's not a solution). That said, what Microsoft hasn't really provided is good guidance on what users can expect to see and any migration path between SharePoint search and FAST. Unfortunately, that really hasn't changed: Microsoft hasn't released any roadmap for FAST's integration, though you could argue it's still early.

That aside, what could the FAST acquisition mean to SharePoint customers? Here are a few of my thoughts:

The FAST acquisition was officially completed today. This is a good thing, since Microsoft can now get down to the business of integrating the company's technology with the rest of Microsoft's products. However, it's not clear what, if any, impact this acquisition will have in the very short term. Judging by the Groove acquisition, which preceded the SharePoint 2007 release by some months, an acquisition after the release will not yield any updates in the core product until SharePoint vNext (probably around 2010 or so) and beyond. However, I'd be willing to bet that some elements of the demo given at the SharePoint conference make their way to sites like Codeplex or as free downloads on Microsoft's site.
The former CEO of FAST will assume the role of VP of Enterprise Search. His responsibility will include all search products: SharePoint search, Search Server Express and FAST ESP. So I guess the "Enterprise Search" moniker might need to be removed or rewritten on the SharePoint search page; FAST is, by far, the new "enterprise" search product at Microsoft. What's interesting here is that Microsoft has historically brought Office-related technologies under one roof; just look at what happened to SharePoint specifically -- that product was once its own product group. As they integrate FAST, it would appear that this announcement suggests Microsoft might break out search into its own dedicated team and make SharePoint a "customer." This opens up the possibility of decoupling SharePoint from any particular search technology -- perhaps a pipe dream, but we can always hope.
In a blog entry on the Enterprise Search blog, Microsoft stated that the FAST offering will continue its Linux and Unix support. The blog entry was quick to reinforce the message that Microsoft does not want to support or wish to invest in Linux or Unix solutions. While they would like to "delight a core part of FAST's customer base," they are openly hoping those customers will convert to Windows and .NET. This does call into question whether this Linux/Unix support will be long for the world. In the short term, however, Microsoft can boast a better product from which to launch a play to be a real contender in the enterprise search space; see our related blog entries and article on FAST here. In the long term, Microsoft will have to come to grips with the fact that enterprises will continue to leverage non-Windows technology and if Microsoft wants to benefit from that revenue, they should consider continuing FAST's support for those technologies (their recent earnings announcement, and the subdued guidance for the year, may reinforce that message).
Microsoft won't support SharePoint on Linux <gasp!>. This is probably not a surprise to anyone who is even vaguely familiar with Microsoft. However, the fact that FAST (currently) is supported on Linux may introduce greater content aggregation and, certainly, search capabilities within SharePoint. Let's hope that Microsoft sees it that way.

In general, the FAST acquisition, for SharePoint, will likely have little impact short term. Over the longer term, it's clear that the Office 14 version of SharePoint will be substantially improved in the search area (depending on the SharePoint product team's willingness to implement the new technology). I would personally like to see some add-ons in the near term, since that would improve search within organizations that may have both tools.

Stay tuned for more on this topic as the integration progresses. (Enterprise Search)

Edited by CMSWatch on Apr. 26

SharePoint, accessibility, and web standards - Our new SharePoint Report explains how one of the core challenges with the platform -- dating from inception through to MOSS 2007 -- is that the needs of a collaboration service often conflict with the requirements of other information services, particularly around website publishing.

One example: like many other portal vendors, by default MOSS wants to insert a lot of extra code and non-standard mark-up on every page to create an interactive collaboration dashboard. As this MSDN brief on how to performance-tune a MOSS 2007 WCM site warns, "Office SharePoint Server, by default, is not XHTML compliant." This has manifold implications for website publishing, not the least of which is accessibility.

Can you fix this? Yes, with an experienced developer carefully going into the innards of the tool at various levels to replace code. Not particularly friendly.

Of late, Redmond has been touting its "Accessibility Kit for SharePoint." At least one avid researcher points out that the fix remains incomplete. (Link thanks to Martin White.)

As Web CMS Report readers know, some competing web content management packages quietly suffer the same problem. At least with SharePoint you can read all about it publicly. But Microsoft casts a huge shadow on this space, and their relative disregard for core web standards just lowers the bar for everyone else. (Web Content Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on Apr. 24

More on Wikis in the Enterprise - Our partners in Denmark, J. Boye, have just published a white paper, Wiki in the Enterprise.

There are many useful nuggets in the research (including a handy project check-list), but what I liked best about the paper is that it clearly contrasts the real value of wikis in a workgroup setting with the thorny challenges that wikis present enterprises once they evolve beyond a single departmental implementation. Have a look. (ECM Suites)

Edited by CMSWatch on Apr. 22

A Greener CMS? - "Recycling" information (a.k.a., "content reuse") is a critical goal for most content management systems. On this Earth Day 2008, I thought it appropriate to share another green movement that's emerging in the content management industry. While researching SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions for The Web CMS Report 2008, I talked to several customers who stated "it is greener" as a reason they decided to choose a hosted solution for their enterprise.

Granted, it was not the decisive reason -- apparently getting out of the IT business is more compelling than saving the planet -- but it was the first time that I heard it as a factor.

Many observers consider SaaS greener to the traditional installed approach because SaaS providers host multiple "tenants" on the same servers. This more efficient approach requires less energy and releases less CO₂ than if each tenant were running their own servers.

So it should come as no surprise that two of the four SaaS CMS vendors we cover, Clickability and CrownPeak, both promote their offerings using the "greener" message. Clickability promotes their Four Green Tenets of the SaaS Model, and today CrownPeak announced a site devoted to helping other companies achieve carbon neutrality.

In an era of increasing server virtualization, this argument holds less water, at least within larger enterprises who are increasingly mastering virtualization. But for the mid-market customers that most SaaS vendors target, energy savings could become quite real. The bigger benefit may come in not having to employ people to babysit your Web CMS servers -- quite literally reducing the carbon-based footprints in your enterprise...

Of course, SaaS isn't for everyone. Bringing the wrong solution into your enterprise can generate a lot of hot air and steam, too, so consider all factors here.

Happy Earth Day. (Web Content Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on Apr. 22

On RedDot and Balance - Last week we received an e-mail from an IT staffer at an outfit that is looking to buy a Web CMS tool, with PaperThin's CommonSpot and RedDot CMS (part of the extended Open Text family) under particular consideration. The e-mail was a forwarded message from a RedDot salesperson, excerpting significant pieces of our Web CMS Report 2008 to make CommonSpot look bad and RedDot look good.

This is an explicit violation of our no-commercial-use policy, which forbids vendors or anyone else from using our findings as marketing material (our policy is modeled after that of the famous U.S.-based evaluation service, Consumer Reports). Somebody or some bodies at RedDot clearly took a lot of time to either OCR or re-type the text (you can't copy-paste from the PDF). They then took a lot more time to extensively -- if quite disingenuously -- redact portions of the text to make it look like we love their product (we don't) and dislike CommonSpot (we don't). I imagine other RedDot competitors were lined up and chopped down in similar fashion.

Consider the following excerpt from the RedDot salesperson's 4-page message:

"Open Text also holds a yearly LiveLinkUp conference for all of their customers and partners,... You can also find regional user groups around the world, an annual international summit, and an online developer community."

And our actual report text with the redacted clause italicized:

although RedDot customers we met there departed wondering where their web publishing needs fit in among the enterprise-focused Open Text strategy

Or this from the e-mail:

"...the product is mature, with a large customer base (over 2,500) and significant internal and external consulting expertise for customers to tap, plus a modestly active user community..you would buy it from a well-regarded vendor, Open Text, with a solid (if complex) "ECM" strategy..."

Which is really this in the report:

RedDot may lack the R&D energy of an Interwoven, Tridion, Day, or Sitecore, but the product is mature, with a large customer base (over 2,500) and significant internal and external consulting expertise for customers to tap, plus a modestly active user community.

And yet, RedDot average deal sizes continue to grow. We think this reflects more the cachet and customer expectations surrounding working with a major ECM vendor like Open Text, rather than intrinsic improvements to the core product -- which indeed have been rather slow in coming. Indeed, for what you get -- a somewhat dated mid-marketish toolset -- RedDot cannot be a called a great value. Nevertheless, you would buy it from a well-regarded vendor, Open Text, with a solid (if complex) "ECM" strategy.

The hatchet job on CommonSpot was as bad or worse.

Now, you and I both know that software sales can be a hurly-burly sport. Caveat emptor and all that. And we've all seen vendors distill convenient quotes from analyst reports across the spectrum (though, disappointingly, often with those analyst firms' approval). What's a bit startling here, though, is the depth of the dishonesty behind the very many ellipses. Although possibly the work of a rogue sales exec, it would seem to confirm my growing suspicions over the years that RedDot as a company has a tendency to play it rather fast and loose.

This makes RedDot all the odder fit within Open Text, an ECM vendor that -- whatever its shortcomings -- has always maintained a conservative, lower-key reputation in the face of the Oracles of this world. In fact, you can really feel the distance within Open Text (c.f., the LiveLinkUp meeting mentioned above), as if Open Text considers RedDot a sometimes charming younger sibling whose misdeeds are ultimately an embarrassment to the family name. It's too bad, really, because RedDot customers probably lose out in the end.

The larger issue here, though, is the way you look at software. Software development is really about trade-offs. Unless we all start managing our websites exactly the same way, something that works well in a tool for one customer can be a detriment for another customer. Do not seek to discover whether a software product is "good" or "bad." Ultimately you have to take a tougher but more meaningful measure: is that product a good fit for what you're trying to accomplish.

This means that every time an analyst or consultant praises some product feature, you have to ask yourself whether, in your case, that feature is actually a demerit -- and vice-versa. A more balanced view of the products -- and your needs -- can get you to the right solution. (Web Content Management)

Edited by CMSWatch on Apr. 21

The E in ECM revisited - I have used a slide called "The E in ECM" in various PowerPoint incarnations for years. Today I read a great blog entry by Philip Howard, who adds another interesting perspective to this. The E in ECM stands of course for Enterprise, but what does the word "Enterprise" actually mean? Well strictly speaking an Enterprise is any firm with more than 10,000 employees (definitions vary of course), and tends to consist of many divisions, departments, and locations.

So an ECM system then is a Content Management System that can be deployed across an Enterprise, or then again, maybe it is not.

Vendors take particular liberty with the term Enterprise. In fact of the 32 vendors we cover in the ECM Suites Report, less than a handful can make a serious claim to be true enterprise-wide options. Most have been built for departmental use, and that is also how they are sold -- albeit that the buying department may comprise a small part of a larger "Enterprise." Most ECM systems have not been architected to scale to 10,000-plus users, they have not been designed to operate in a truly complex and heterogeneous infrastructure, nor have they been priced and licensed to make sense in such wide deployments. In short for most vendors the E simply makes a product sound important, nothing more.

Philip makes the interesting point that ECM is also about enterprise-wide strategies and implications, not just technology. That is, the wrong local decision can have negative impacts on the enterprise as a whole, just as the wrong technology selection can (and often is) a failure at the buying point, but with repercussions that can resonate throughout the enterprise.

ECM is expensive both in terms of resources as well as software. Getting it right though can bring huge benefits. The onus then is unfortunately is on you, the buyer, to see through the mislabeling of products, and to "think globally and to act locally" A technology vendor cannot normally help you with that process, but good advice from independent consultants, advisers, user groups, and forums (and of course CMS Watch reports!) can make a difference. (ECM Suites)

Edited by CMSWatch on Apr. 21

Y! IndexTools...let the games begin - The announcement to make Yahoo! IndexTools a free service, coming so quickly on the heels of the acquisition, would seem to serve notice to Omniture, Google Analytics, and other market leaders, such as Nedstat, Coremetrics', Unica, and WebTrends' about the seriousness of Yahoo!'s intentions.

Eric Peterson has written a very thoughtful post that delves into the market implications on this latest move.

But from a customer perspective, this could become a bit confusing in the short term. According to IndexTool's Dennis Mortensen, current customers were contacted to let them know they'd be able to continue using the service at no cost if they sign forthcoming agreement from Yahoo!. Details about the agreement and how this impacts current customization projects is still being sorted out, as is how long customers will have to determine if they want to accept the terms.

I'm sure most customers will be inclined to sign the agreement to maintain continuity, unless they have concerns about Yahoo! storing their data, as Google stores Google Analytics data.

Is this a founded concern?

It all depends on your privacy policies -- something you should consider in your requirements for a web analytics tool to begin with. If you haven't figured this out, then you should.

My guess is that for most current IndexTools customers, this will not be a show stopper.

If it does present difficulties for your enterprise, now would be the time to review the vendor profiles in the Web Analytics Report.

In the meantime, current IndexTools customers will surely be asking some important questions, like whether all their current functionality will remain available for free, and if so, for how long. Will data from the pre-Yahoo! days still be available? For how long? How will this affect custom work that you're doing or planning have done by IndexTools, as well as whether there will be a new technical and professional service availability and cost structure? And what about new features and releases, such as Rubix; what will be the cost and support structure?

Yahoo! is moving quickly, and I expect that they will seek to address these issues. However, as a customer, you'll have to make sure that you get these and other questions answered completely before signing on the dotted line.

(Web Analytics)

Edited by CMSWatch on Apr. 21

Join a free SharePoint strategy webinar - We participate regularly in the semi-annual Enterprise³ Conference (former Portals and Collaboration Conference). The next event, in San Diego, CA in May, covers a wide range of topics, mostly around the nexus of Portals, SharePoint, and Social Software. Jarrod and I will both present on a number of topics (e.g., Facebook).

As a pre-cursor to the event, I'm leading a free one-hour webinar, "Evaluating SharePoint from a Business Perspective," on Thursday, April 24, 2008 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT. Use the "CMS" priority code when you register. Hope you can join in! (Enterprise Portals)

Edited by CMSWatch on Apr. 18

Love Your Local Data Warehouse Manager - Within most enterprises, the worlds of "data" and "content" remain far apart, despite recurring business needs to converge different types of information. Tony Byrne argues that data specialists have a lot to teach content specialists -- and vice-versa. The trick is finding common ground, allied interests, and a common vocabulary... (ECM Suites)

Edited by CMSWatch on Apr. 17

Compliance is a dirty word - If there is one word I hate to hear used in this industry

News

See also