Hovering Over The Back Button

The perennial "what is a CMS" debate broke out this week, with a fairly innocuous tweet from Dirk Shaw, "I am sorry but wordpress is hardly a web content management system." that many of our CMS community waded into and included this post on CMS Myth arguing in favour and just about everyone arguing against... and crikey I might  not be standing next to my on-line friends on this - now Dirk knows what he's talking about, as a Vignette alumnus and blogger, maybe the key to the phrase he used is the word 'hardly' - could I suggest we should say 'barely''? [ read more ]

Forgive the cheesy title, but yes I gave a presentation at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising (TfMA) show last week where I talked about the place of content and in web or digital engagement. Or as marketing put it in the show guide synopsis:  "The importance of good content management and governance as a platform for engaging your website visitors" [ read more ]

I'm going to kick off 2010 with a blog post about Web Content Management, enough for now of my wittering on about my place in the social web or even web engagement. Content is still king and as I catch up with three weeks or so of my RSS reader, it seems that at the end of last year - the decade - that there was a new CMS blogging trend and it's for talking about trends, the CMS blogosphere was alive with predictions. All worthy of comment and I thought maybe I can chuck in some thoughts of my own. [ read more ]

As part of preparation for a presentation he gave yesterday at Jboye '09 - a few days ago Jon Marks set a challenge to his Twitter community; to give him examples of where Web Content Management fails. I admit I am not at the JBoye event, so I have missed seeing Jon in action - but as a blogger on this sort of thing, let alone as a WCM vendor it would be rude to ignore the wealth of great points this process threw up. As Jon crowd sourced his presentation content, seemingly every element of a CMS procurement and project got a mention. [ read more ]

I've written a book - alright quite a small book admittedly and when I say 'I've written' - I do mean with the help of various members of our marketing team - @karengibbons, @bob_barker and @lindajvetter  - but none the less, sitting on my desk, fresh from the printers is The Little Book of Web Engagement. It's  88 pages of tips, ideas, quotes and anecdotes on the what, how, why and who of putting your website into the front line of customer engagement. [ read more ]

CMS bloggers of the world have been double dared again, not this time by @kasthomas, but by Julian Wraith (@julianwraith)- who in this post wants the CMS community to gaze into our crystal balls and speculate on the future of Content Management.I think the Future of Content Management is about people. Is that too predictable, does this mean I am going to wang on about ease of use? [ read more ]

Suddenly, everyone in the content management world has jumped off the Web 2.0 buzzword bus and jumped on the one marked ‘Engagement’. What does this mean? Where are we really going? Folks seem to have merely scribbled out yesterday’s out of favour term ‘Web 2.0’ and inked in ‘Engagement’ and are using it as a label for community building; social media web tools – like blogs, wikis and comments. [ read more ]

More thoughts on Vignette and OpenText. The news of OpenText planning to gobble up Vignette and the recent Interwoven acquisition by Autonomy sees a new chapter for these grandees of content management and I think is further evidence in the shifts that have been occurring in this market around Enterprise Content Management and what organisations really want to do. [ read more ]

I recently read and commented on one of the many great blog posts out there that give advice on how companies approach the social web, in this article Kevin Gibbons lays down some basics – have a purpose, write well, be transparent and to basically be nice to your audience.

All great points. My comment was to be yourself, be a person.

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At the beginning of last week a CMS 'meme' broke out, where CMS vendor bloggers were challenged to reveal something about their products functionality and then tag other vendors to do similar. Day kicked this off from their developer site using a set of questions posted by Kas Thomas at CMS Watch, In this post, I make a belated Alterian contribution. [ read more ]