To know me professionally, is to know that when it comes to the tribes of CMS folks, I am firmly in the WCM teepee.

I disagreed the first time this discussion rolled around, as the millennium clicked over – we were all going to use portal platforms and content management functionality would be in our application server infrastructure (we don’t and it didn’t).

The difference between the systems we are building for tomorrow and then – is that it was a web site centric world and in most applications the term CMS was interchangeable with WCM. Our digital engagement activities were single threaded in a website groove and the end was very much the driver for the means.

Also, mainstream requirement trends like dynamic delivery with the content editorial usability requirement for in-context editing mean’t a preference for management and delivery to be tightly coupled.

I am summarizing wildly – but the supposedly ‘niche’ WCM vendors then went on to rule the school.

Is it now time to unpick that? I think so, but why?

I think there are two pressures and they are content and delivery.

Starting with delivery, even if we are only concerned with web engagement, we are in the age of the ‘splinternet’ (in this context, a term coined by Josh Bierhoff)

Now with iPhones, Androids, Kindles, Tablets, and TVs connecting to the Web [..] our site may not work right on these devices, especially if it includes flash or assumes mouse-based navigation. Apps that work on the iPhone don’t work on the Android. Widgets for FiOS TV don’t work anywhere else.

But it’s not just devices, our websites are less the single and only web destination, folks consume information about our products and services from various places – Facebook and Twitter to name two.

Plus, of course the needs of customer, consumer and citizen engagement means that we can chuck in multiple touch points, in e-mail, call centres and real life.

So, we have a fragmented communication channel and across these we need to be consistent and if and when these folks do get to our websites, they are expecting a compelling, relevant web experience. Your brochure is not welcome here.

You quickly start to build a set of complex delivery requirements, that appear (I stress appear) to dwarf those of your content production.

Could we call this the engagement tier? Where we pull this stuff together, of understanding the context of the user, the device – finding the right content and delivering it. (No, no, not a portal, this could be an e-mail, a tweet or an iPad application)

So, that’s delivery – I talked about two pressures – what about content?

Content no longer forms an orderly queue out of our marketing and communication organisations to be fed to our cradled audience through a teat.

Content production is being equally fractured, with content to be marshalled from more internal sources as we find the voices that can respond across these channels and an ever increasing volume of external content being produced about our products and services.

To deliver these relevant, engagement experiences, we need to make it easy for our contributors, we need to know our content, where is it, what is it about and whether it’s fit for purpose? Sounds like getting back to some down home, good, honest content management?

If we are going to start talking about this tier, this could also make our ECM and CMIS discussions more interesting, if we start to figure out how we surface our enterprise (small e) content into that engagement tier.

I’m not sure we’ll buy these from different vendors, I’m confident we already have. I am also fairly sure an engagement tier is about as heterogeneous as they come, with specialist vendors both large and small playing a role.

I think we are going to have to start to watch this space, what do you think?

I found this really interesting and it sparked a Twitter conversation with the most learned of my fellow content management professionals – Philippe Parker (@proops) and Zahoor Hussain (@izahoor) and I started to feel that 140 chars wasn’t cutting it and was inspired to blog.

There is a feeling of an industry coming of age in this story, that the implementation of our industries software has a marked and profound effect on organisations, this ‘C’ level attention I’ve been talking about recently.

I have used the industrial revolution analogy in the title as clearly one of the benefits of implementing a CMS system is around efficiency. The most basic ROI of doing more with the same or maybe less resources – the same crude metric for implementing spinning looms instead of spinning wheels – that revolutionised the textile industry and therefore presumably the clothes we wear today.

In addition easier to use tools enable artists with no craft skills to create stuff – move to today where even I can upload my company logo or a witty message onto a website and some machine somewhere will reel off a T shirt for me – I don’t need to know how to spin, sew, screen print or any of that stuff.

I can extend the analogy slightly further, in that the  industrialisation of making stuff created a more consistent quality product that was available to the masses. Much like CMS systems, being easier (and cheaper) to use than hand crafting html, with their spell checkers, accessibility compliance, metadata tagging, XHTML standards, navigation management  and work-flow processes – create better, more consistent content, delivered efficiently, at an acceptable price (maybe!) for the masses.

I feel sorry for the vendor involved, caught up on the front line here (and in the full contact sport that is being a CMS vendor, someone will score a cheap shot on this). I am fairly sure the Luddites really didn’t give a stuff about the make of loom they were destroying during their futile effort to hold back change.

(Clearly I could be wrong, it might be about the product and the journalists might be striking because the vendors product UI makes their eyes bleed – but I doubt it!)

Of course, there is something more subtle going on here than just Luddites burning computers and this blog post by Roy Greenslade – a journalist from the the Guardian Newspaper – touches on a lot of great points. The issue is far more complex than I could cover in this blog, in an industry widely commented as facing huge threats and change.

But, reading the Greenslade article you get an insight into not just the industrial relations faux par committed (the bit that’s making the mainstream news) – but also, reading it as a Content Management Professional (as Philippe and Zahoor pointed out in their tweets) about the CMS implementation Pandora’s box they have opened.

How many times have we seen CMS projects, with a super bit of software, lovingly moulded and crafted by some great folks in a project to fit their perception of the business – ultimately fail as there was no buy in from the people that use the thing?

A process that works best starting from the procurement – I’ve seen great projects, ambitious projects – build fantastic foundations for success by getting those stakeholders into the process early. Do know you what? Those projects are the ones that beat the widely quoted industry average of a 3 year project/software churn.

Those very efficiency savings and ROI figures don’t look so rosy if you factor in the real possibility of the users  hating it (even if they don’t officially go on strike) that only 50% of the team will adopt the software, that this will be the peak as those numbers dwindle as they either scrape together budget to do their own thing, continue to use existing tools, email you their content in word documents or work on a way to replace the system. Seriously, user adoption is the most critical factor in the success of a project, post the ticker tape parade of go-live.

That’s where my analogy falls apart, this is not the industrial revolution, we’re not implementing new machines, operated by less people with lower skills, – OK so they just don’t need to be HTML craftsman, but they still need to be good writers – as Greenslade puts it in his blog -

it is clear that “content” is not a substitute for “journalism”

I am not suggesting that in a single blog post  I have the answers to, what is obviously a complex issue for the Johnstone Press – but at face value, the story does highlight that implementing a CMS is an opportunity, but one that in every organisation must be considered seriously.

Whilst it does perhaps open up journalism or publication to the less skilled masses (as I demonstrate by writing this) -  a CMS is not a content loom churning out more content, it relies on the quality raw material.

That raw material is reliant on good quality, knowledgeable people that needs to be respected as you build the machine – it is, if you like a better spinning wheel, requiring deft operation by a knowledge worker – not by a sooty faced Victorian child.

Now I agree we need to draw the line somewhere, you describe ‘content’ and ‘management’ loose enough and suddenly every RDBMS could consider itself a CMS – especially if your pet part time geek has slapped a PHP front end that adds rows – I quite like this from Robert Rose, in his post – Why every CMS fails:

Wikipedia defines content management as “a collection of procedures used to manage workflow in a collaborative environment.” Put simply, a CMS is a process meant to grease the workflow skids for managing web content. It doesn’t matter if it is a million dollar software tool or some dude named Sergei FTPing files from Dreamweaver, every organization that updates a website has a CMS.

I am going to skate over the academic discussion over what we ought to consider a Content Management System to be, by hiding behind the excuse of brevity and not having the room here or to presume that you the reader has the time to indulge me.

I am just going to say that I am not sure that we can define it, it’s the market that decides and there’s a lot of stuff out there packaged up with the CMS label. Perhaps we even run the risk of saying there is everything labelled CMS (good, bad and ugly) and there is WordPress. My concern here is the if we get snooty about what constitutes a CMS – we could be missing something or failing the folks that are confused by this software space.

WordPress is a specialised CMS (or WCM). But blogging platforms (or might I add wikis) are just CM systems, simple ones – with specialist fancy user interfaces and web applications, that have carved their own CMS niche in all the excitement about Web 2.0 – are they not?

I think perhaps our industry needs to take a look at why people are reaching for these tools instead of “traditional” CMS products. It’s not just because they are free, plenty of open source alternatives around – it’s about the ease of adoption, perhaps the very lack of governance, the basic ease at which you can just get publishing? Maybe these are requirements we need to be listening to as an industry – rather than try to exclude them from the club.

Folks suggest that WordPress is not a CMS because you can’t create content types, that it doesn’t have a multi role approval process or whatever – but if I only require a single content type (or a page based CMS) and you only have a couple of excellent trusted authors – maybe it fits the requirements?

It also doesn’t have in-context editing or multi-site functionality, but then neither do plenty of commercial and open source established CMS products – so where do we draw the line? (Nice conversation happening now about Drupal vs WordPress going on Twitter as I write this – being driven Jon Marks).

There’s a law when CMS folks are having a discussion, that it will come to a car analogy (what is it with CMS folks and cars?) and in this case Scott Liewehr did this – by comparing WordPress with a scooter. But, I’d like to think of as a car - the Tata Nano. I believe that the Tata Nano is the words cheapest and (arguably) the most basic new car on sale today.

If you are a family in India, used to loading your family precariously onto a moped the Tata Nano is a revelation, access to a new freedom in transportation – although a Tata Nano won’t meet a rural farmers requirement to get a lamb to the end of a muddy lane and it certainly won’t meet McLaren’s requirements to have the Mercedes and Vodafone logos dancing on the top step after a formula 1 weekend. But, it’s still a car.

These analogies often don’t really work very well, as we don’t buy cars for the same reason as we buy software, but if I may try to extend it – there are governing bodies that defines what is a car, a van, or a truck.

I guess in software, that’s what analysts are for? In any case, without that trying to hold back the tide of content management systems that don’t meet this or that ideal for a CMS has a whiff of Canute about it – there are so many of them and who can tell them whether they call their offering a CMS or not.

Maybe a cheese analogy would be better here, if I want to produce English Stilton, some nice man, probably in the EU needs to approve, telling me and my market that my product is Stilton. In the absence of this (or the crowning of a benevolent CMS dictator) – it’s beholden on CMS practitioners to educate the market, to understand, own and define their requirements and understand what it really takes to meet them.

You could argue that blogging platforms, in the same way as the Tata Nano will revolutionize access to transportation in India, have revolutionised people’s access to being published, prepared a generation of new authors to contribute content – that I have referred to as democratized content authoring.

They have also prepared folks for consuming a new kind of content, informal stuff that comes from knowledgeable folks – rather than what sales and marketing say in their (I should say ‘our’, as I am one of them) business speak, jargon littered ‘on message’ sales messaging. This is an opportunity for anyone driving a web content management (or dare I say engagement) project today – I maintain that it’s ongoing success will rely on fresh new content and those contributors.

I’ve digressed, I’m supposed to be talking about tools and we’ve seen what a CMS means change hugely over the last 10 years, from an IT enabling rag bag toolkit of API’s and you build on yourself over a painfully expensive year long project – to an expectation of business user driven, easy to install and implement tools that deliver value in weeks.

I’ve talked here about how the titans of our industry got distracted by ECM, while a vibrant community of new vendors delivered what the web content management systems that actually everyone wanted.

Lets’s not do the same thing here, with CMS – sure WordPress is barely a CMS – implementing it for a decent sized site could catapult you back into the dark ages of web content management, like I imagine that jumping from your Prius into a Nano would be. You’ll also get very expensively stuck if you try and adapt your Nano to do the job of a Land Rover or the McLaren MP4-25.

- But it’s teaching us lessons on what the people want and we should respond and welcome it into the club..

Alright, I admit we didn’t quite plan it this way – but that’s the lesson of the new social media powered PR – you can’t always control it and it’s often a test of reactions – of ensuring you have the right tools, people and message to do that.

In this post (as I tend to on this blog) I’ll be focusing on my experience – you can read our official news release on Alterian Content Manager 7, it’ll give you some background as what I am going to ramble on about here.

Anyway, Tuesday a rumour is going around, I get a couple of DM’s – and Janus mischievously tweets:

sources tell that Alterian will soon discontinue Immediacy / Alterian CM Corp. Edition – wondering if customers will enjoy the sunset

Ah… not entirely true, but now it’s out there – so strap yourselves in folks – you’re launching a product strategy on social media!

The vigilant Irina Guseva of CMSWire clearly had her ear to the ground and grabbed me for an exclusive interview and in no time at all (how does she do that so fast?)  published – Alterian Drops Immediacy, Morello Web CMS Brands.

In the meantime – and this demonstrates the diversity of this CMS community – there’s a CMS Haiku competition going on – Jon Marks (@mcboof) is offering free beer to the winners (yes folks, the stakes are raised, this isn’t about product marketing any more, it’s about beer) – he dares me to pitch in:

@iantruscott  Now that @irina_guseva  has broken the news (http://bit.ly/b8RQlO), can’t you re-break it in #cmshaikuform?

I quickly scan through the social media bibles; “Groundswell”, “Here Comes Everybody”, Jeremiah Owyang’s entire blog archive – no mention of haiku as a required skill of today’s social media marketer.

In truth, I admit, I did have to Google how exactly to write haiku – more on my first poetic foray later.

The next day starts with what we eventually agree was a Twitter interview (no doubt someone calls these “twinterviews”) by James Hoskins (@JamesHoskins) – long time social media agent provocateur – especially when it comes to all things CMS and Alterian.

Unfortunately it’s difficult to find this conversation, James and I didn’t hashtag it and twitter doesn’t lend itself to a Q & A structure, unless you want to read it backwards through replies – and I haven’t really got room for it all here. We have however ensured that the excellent points James has made are in our official communications.

This goes on all day and some of the next, with other folks now pitching in with questions – at the end, James pays me a huge compliment:

#followfriday @iantruscott  - raising the bar for other WCM vendor VPs in openness and engagement #alterian

Meanwhile – Adriaan Bloem (@AdriaanBloem) of CMSWatch got in touch, for a quick briefing, we have a positive chat and he quickly knocks up this blog post – provocatively titled “Alterian Drops Immediacy” and written in the house style, of a father warning his daughters to watch out for those vendor types, with their high-falutin’ words and fancy charming ways – nothing wrong with that – but please read my (admittedly lengthy) comment response.

Crikey.. now I’ve got Philippe Parker (@proops) encouraging me to haiku.

@IanTruscott impressed you can explain your strategy in #140 – now please do it as a #cmshaiku

So.. double dared… here goes.

C M C or E / Here me Alterian say / Autumn is Future

Which surprisingly made it to the short list and the community got to vote – it got a respectable 3rd, but no beer. (I could protest – the haiku rules I play by said it needed to include a season!).

So folks, that’s it. A few days in the life of product marketing via social media. It was fun – demonstrates that today marketing and PR is as much about listening and reacting as it is about planned strategies. It also sparked off a whole bunch of interesting conversations I’ve had with clients and partners since.

..and to whoever whispered that rumour in Janus Boye’s ear – I would genuinely like to thank you.

We have been executing a communication plan that started last year with our customer and partner events and we intend that the program will reach all of our customers and partners in the next few weeks. If you have questions about our strategy, then please contact me directly (ian.truscott@alterian.com), or your Alterian representative.

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.

For starters I’d better set some context, of what I think about our market historically, so you know where I stand.

Content Management has gone through various trends, casting my mind back, it was once believed that the CMS services (CMS only mean’t web publishing back then) would be commoditised down into the application server and that the application server in turn would be part of the operating system. We would then build content management and deliver applications (or portals) on this common back end – and of course this Java centric world view never came to pass.

Back then a CMS was an IT enabler and part of the infrastructure and that infrastructure grew to become managing all content and knowledge of an enterprise – an Enterprise Content Management System – it’s reach extending to Digital Asset Management, Document Management – the world became obsessed by compliance, records management and the vision moved from the geek to the librarian – of turning organisations into filing systems.

All very worthwhile, but in the meantime the budget and requirements pendulum swung toward the business – and marketing specifically – as they didn’t like the IT focus of these early CMS implementations, didn’t get the greater good of ECM and wanted to focus on the marketing problem at hand – a website they could own.

So, an agile, diverse, vibrant bunch of open source, small to mid-tier vendors rushed into the space the old titans of CMS (now ECM guys) had disconnected from. The focus was on ease of use, of rapid implementation, of appealing to this newly empowered business user and for some, their chums at the agency with easily accessible and cheap site building skills like PHP and ASP.NET.

And increasingly, through social media making people at ease with web publishing – a democratisation of content authoring.

Yes I know, I’ve simplistically crashed through quite a lot of history in a few crude paragraphs, but in a nutshell – we’ve gone from pleasing the geeks, then the librarians to it being all about the business user, the marketer or the communicator.

This broad band of website building offerings, delivery models and tools that enable real people to add pages to a website, from a range of vendors – the ECM leviathans to open source projects – came to be known as WCM. And it is a broad church of technologies, best practice, capabilities (from a blog, a brochureware site to a multi-national roll out of hundreds of personalised sites) and of course prices.

To some a WCM is nothing more than a PHP UI on a database, or maybe it’s a web delivery infrastructure and to others its an intelligent purveyor of well understood personalised content to the discerning, well understood visitor – its hard to tell what’s out of the box and what’s down down to the skill of the crew that builds with it.

Which brings me back to my trend topic and the predictions - this nebulous haze of requirements, product and solution capability has attracted a fair amount of comment, as my fellow bloggers swish around the tea leaves for what’s next.

The general view is that WCM – the acronym, the definition of this as a software space is up for debate and that maybe 2010 is the year we see some changes.

Barb Mosher in Emerging Trends in Web Content Management over at CMSWire says:

we really need to think less about WCM as the only way to categorize a product/solution/platform and start thinking tag lines like “Web Publishing Framework”, “Integrated Online Marketing”, “Content Creation and Management”. Are we caught up in trying to define a market that is changing so rapidly that it really defies definition?

Laurence Hart (@piewords) also touches on this, in his Predictions for 2010 post:

Constantly Hyping Acronyms Of Systems: WCM is suffering. It doesn’t really cover mobile platforms well and there are big differences in the presentation and the management of the landscape.

Enterprise Content Management and WCM will go their separate ways. Okay, that isn’t going to happen, but it NEEDS to happen. Why? Because it is distracting them from their core, which is the platform and their core applications.

This last comment was inspired by the CMSWatch predictions, one of which being that Document Management and ECM will go their separate ways (so if ECM and WCM are splitting, who’s left at the ECM party?). CMSWatch also inspired a typically entertaining post from Jon Marks – in which he says:

Enterprise Content Management is well defined. The term WCM is horseshit, unnecessary and should take a long walk off a short pier….. I can already see the news headlines: LONDON, 2009 – SHOCK HORROR! WCM Geek Demands Death of term WCM. But it’s true. I’m of the camp that wished the term WCM would cease to exist.

Jon then goes onto de-construct WCM into its constituent parts, with an underlying content infrastructure layer with common standards (CMIS/JCR), separated from a delivery framework.

His post inspired Seth Gottlieb at Content Here, who agrees, wondering if we should go back to calling it CM  - you should also check out Peter Monks and The Case for Killing “WCM”, inspired by Jon (and he nicely puts how we WCM folks feel about Jon calling us losers!). Then, if you haven’t had your WCM predictions fill, then I’d also suggest a look at this from Peter Monks on his shiny new personal blog.

I am not sure how one goes about creating the tipping point that defines a new software segments or niche, how do we get customers asking for one of these new website-publishing-but-not-WCM-doohickies?

Clearly the analysts are key to this, CMSWatch had a stab at realigning their tiers and I think that’s definitely work in progress and needs at least a bit more explanation, Gartner have got back into WCM after a long absence of ECM focus and Forrester have long observed WCM as part of the marketing platform mix. But – I am sure that CMSWire, Jon, Peter, Seth, Barb and Lawrence have more influence than they admit, so perhaps it could be the year of the death of the definition of WCM as we know it today.

OK, so I had better venture my own predictions, it would be rude not having had a look at what these folks have had to say.

Personally, I think whatever we call it – we’ve had the era of IT, the librarian and the business user/marketer – and whilst clearly all of these folks should be catered for in the WCM of 2010 – I think it’s the era of the audience, our community, citizens or customers – the visitor.

Yes folks, it’s web engagement – sorry, did I say I wan’t going to talk about that…?

Image of cystal ball published under Creative Commons License, courtesy of  Bitterjug

I am also obviously going to talk about Web Content Management, which I think is interesting as this turns the discussion from the theoretical and well ordered filing system that your organisation should become, to being about achieving something. WCM is about publishing to the web, not about having well ordered drawers of stuff.

I’ve been in this WCM industry awhile, so lets put aside the crystal ball a minute and ask if we have yet delivered on the CMS promise of 10 years ago? (That’s we as in our industry, rather than we as in our company). Of the democratisation of contributing content, of connecting our Knowledge and Information Workers (as Forrester refers to them), the people that know stuff – with the people that want to know stuff?

And I don’t mean those projects where we have hundreds of content authors or an Intranet, I mean connecting the real people (not hundreds of marketers) in an organisation with your audience through the web.

Connecting people? That sounds like a job for social media. With Social Media we are now breaking down communication and marketing barriers in 140 character chunks. Are our websites, or the messaging and brand values they are used to project now being blown apart and deposited in crumbs around the web? We are now potentially all becoming the messengers, representatives, dare I say marketers for our organisations and any other brands, products, destinations, services we interact with and comment upon. But, for all that, websites are still the destination – the majority of tweets are linking people with web content.

Peng T. Ong (founder of Interwoven) in a the forward of the 2001 book “Web Content Management: A Collaborative Approach” – he talks about the motivation behind founding Interwoven – of enabling users and ‘web masters’ (it was 2001) who are “enmeshed in trying to launch websites” amidst the “chaos of building websites” – pains that organisations still feel today.

We are also seeing the “enterprization” of social media, corporate twitter governance, of paid bloggers and of a greater profile for blogging on corporate sites. We are all becoming accustomed to consuming opinion and news when researching products and services and I think we are become less tolerant of and less attentive to the polished sales and marketing message – people want to meet and understand the people behind the brand, we want to hear their opinion and see them. This appears to be to be convergence, as the ownership of the message is moving from marketing to ‘the people’ as at the same time the consumer becomes more accustomed to and expectant of a less formal, blogger, opinion based style of content.

This gets me back to my point, publishing web content is about the people – tools will need to be adopted by engineers, consultants, product managers and customer service reps – not just sales and marketing – the people our audience want to get a feel of.

Wow.. I was astonished by the original Clay article. In 2009 folks are still advocating self building a CMS? Not for some specialist task, but just for managing web content! I then started hacking together a comment for Ron’s blog and it started turning into this, full blown post. 

OK, so previous generations CMS products were pretty close to being IT development frameworks and if this were still the case – I could have some sympathy for Clay’s point of view. If your CMS vendor (or open source project) of choice is handing you a bag of bolts and suggesting you get on with it, then as a developer I would agree that development frameworks have moved on and could be a better bag of bolts.

In those days we’d propose that an organisation build a contribition user interface (or Content Management Application as we used to call them) and a website (or a Content Delivery Application) based on a bunch of API’s – which was what the customer purchased. In those days we recognised that the CMA was 70% of the effort.

A hand rolled ‘CMA’ was nothing like the business user focused tools of today. Today a CMS, and you can pick one from a wide selection of commercial and open source developers, is a sophisticated business user’s tool. We are way past the “here’s a fancy database and a bunch of API’s – now go build” formative years of this market. 

If we imagine that development frameworks, like Ruby on Rails, put you at that same starting point we were at in the late 90′s (which is a very poor assumption) – does anyone still want to direct 70% of their development on the management application – before you even start delighting your site visitors?  

Clay is of the opinion (and seems this is his view on all developed software) that:

“..it has too many opinions. Those opinions were though of by somebody other than you and the needs of your organization. The more developed a content management system (or any piece of software, really) the more “opinions” it has.

That’s quite a position to take. 

I’d prefer to take that statement and replace ‘opinions’ with ‘experience’. Opinions come for free, experience is hard earned. I can be less sure about all open source projects, but the good ones and all recognised commercial products have years and years of experience equity (and R&D dollars) being applied to each release.  

The bright people on a software project agonize over design, architectural decisions, best ways to make it scalable – they do this through personal experience, innovative ideas, customer feedback – a host of experience based scenarios.  

There is such a broad range of products in this CMS market – you are going to need to have something pretty special to compete or to render obsolete that ocean of existing IP.  

The CMS market is being described increasingly as commodotized and certainly the basics are; WYSIWYG editorial, create pages, change navigation, add images, add meta-data etc etc.. are all there. Why would I want to build all that stuff again? 

Do I want to spend 70% of my budget competing with all of that? Will it stretch to the cost of learning all those lessons as I overcome my inexperience? Will my project delight my content contributors as much as my visitors? 

And that last point is important, back to todays CMS being a business user tool – I have said in this blog before a CMS projects success hinges on that contributor adoption – for fresh content – the life blood of your website.

I would also guess that a user interface that suits Clay, a developer, is not necessarily going to be right for the marketing team that will have to feed this thing.      

Plus of course if, or maybe when, things get sticky, you’ve got a community, support or a warranty to fall back on and a bunch of people who know how your stuff works. 

Clay singles out Drupal and implies a frustration in working with it – my suggestion would be to get involved with that community – apply his development cajonas to becoming the change he wishes to see. (Apologies Gandhi).  The world of CMS is a broad church and if the Drupal community won’t embrace his ideas, there are plenty of others.

Of note of course, is that Clay published these ideas using a blogging tool… a focused kind of CMS.    

I’ve already gone on too long – this is the classic ‘build vs buy’ argument, covered in detail elsewhere – and exposes the gulf between writing code and developing software.

This all started last year with a really interesting discussion with Andrew Ewing of HP, at the time he was evangalising records management and we had an incredibly interesting conversation (you always do with Andrew) – one small part was about e-mail attachments. Specifically the huge duplication in most e-mail repositories and the savings his software was bringing to large organisation just doing that alone. 

These huge repositories of duplicated content affect the agility of an organisation – Outlook servers that take eons to backup and seemingly even longer to reboot – it strikes me that all this redundant data is like cholesterol in the arteries of large enterprises.  

I would be willing to bet that any content management practitioner worthy of the badge, has their own version of the ‘single version of the truth’ story. In my case the anecdote of how much Nestle saved when they realised they had thousands of images, separately stored, of someone pouring milk – which I think I picked up at Vignette, has stood me in good stead over the years!

The core of the proposition has traditionally been about governance, of using the right approved content item or image and of being able to squeeze the maximum amount of value out of the production of expensive copy and images. 

The green computing agenda and the cost saving energy strategies that large organisations are now adopting gives this basic competence of a CMS fresh wings. That storing something once is an efficient thing to do. 

I have always got my thrills from specialising in Web Content Management and audience engagement through the web. I am not an Enterprise Content Management (the art of turning your organisation into an efficient filing system) expert, but clearly there are further efficiencies that Document and Records management tools can bring – when you start filing everything in your corporate life once and re-using.    

In addition, rolling out content management projects, in the form of Intranets is an essential part of a strategy of encouraging people to store things once and to create a culture of self service knowledge repositories and sharing links to the one item – rather than giving everyone a copy of a huge presentation or document via e-mail. 

In the WCM world we also need to look at, or more specifically I guess – prospective customers should be challenging their vendors on – the efficiency of how we deliver the content. One of our US financial customers required 24 web servers to power its old solution, before implementing our CMS solution on just six. 

So, back to the article. I was interviewed by a very smart journalist, Carolina K. Reid (sorry no link as she doesn’t appear to be anywhere!), had a very interesting chat resulting in this article – also reprinted for CIO today.   

It’s clear that when confronted with a big problem of load or of storage, the right IT answer is no longer to throw ‘tin’ at it – however cheap ‘tin’ – more servers, more disks – might be these days. The ongoing costs are getting more focus as is the energy consumed in maintaining them in their cooled cocoon and a good content management strategy should figure somewhere in you plans to minimize that.