Category Archives: Content Management

The cool web kids are social, is your CMS ready to hang with them?
This week I had the pleasure of returning to an old haunt as I was asked to present at Gilbane Boston. I say ‘old haunt’ as I was actually completely blindsided by the fact it was not at the Westin in Copley Place – which, by my reckoning, it had been there since before Vignette was founded (or when we were all children). Therefore my cunning plan to stay in my current favorite reasonably priced hotel in Boston (the Colonnade), positioned just outside the Copley place action was a bad one. Continue reading →

Localization – Do You Know the Dutch?
Late last year, I was on a business trip to do a keynote speech Amsterdam. Over dinner the night before I was asked a really interesting question - 'Do you know the Dutch?' Notice the 'the' in the question, I was not being asked if I knew the language, but if I knew the people, the culture and what to expect of my audience the next day. I've been meaning to blog about this since. Continue reading →

The Answer to Every Web Content Publishing Problem Is a Bicycle?
A couple of things have inspired this post, firstly Quora’s insistence that the answer to every CMS question is Drupal, (actually more correctly the communities answer to every question) and a chance encounter of a fellow simultaneously riding a bicycle, carrying a suitcase dicing with death in the Oxford traffic. Which kind of encapsulated a few thoughts I’ve had recently about all this big community generated hype. Now, calm down drupalists I am not suggesting that Drupal is as limited in purpose as a bicycle, I'm using it to represent popularity, ubiquity and availability. Continue reading →

Who Will Buy This Web Engagement?
As the holidays approach, my SKY+ hard disk (PVR/Tivo thing) is brimming with movies ready for the onset of quality time with my young family. Perhaps our viewing pleasure as I recuperated from what I anticipate to be a fine lunch could be an old movie that I think will entertain the girls - the musical Oliver!. In it they sing “Who will buy”, something I have been hearing on blogs and twitter about Web Engagement. Continue reading →

Web Engagement – The Emperor’s New Clothes?
Recently I've been seeing 'an examination' shall we say of the term Web Engagement Management and the acronym WEM. There is a suggestion that it's a figment of the fervid imaginations of software vendor marketing departments possibly in collusion with certain analysts and that dreadful things should be done to it's proponents. In addition, this week I gave a presentation at GXConnect 2010 - 'Web Engagement, Marketing Buzzword or Business Imperative' - and whilst this isn't a transcript of that presentation I wanted to air this debate. So, is this WEM thing the emperors new clothes, a sharp marketing suit or the boiler suit of the workers on the coal face of getting web stuff done? Continue reading →

On Shanty Towns, Bulldozers, Cats and Website Consolidation…
This blog post is inspired by an excellent conversation I had with my colleague Scott Liewehr a few days ago, about the challenges of managing multiple sites – that ended with the comment “that sounds like a great blog post”. So here we are, while the inspiration is still warm - allow me to wheel out an old hobby horse of mine and give it a couple of laps of the yard – not sure I can claim great blog post but.. here goes… Continue reading →