Web Content Management Choosing the Right Tool for Your Organization

Transcription

1 THE BEST PRACTICES SERIES A Guide to Web Content Management Choosing the Right Tool for Your Organization In A Guide to Web Content Management, you learned about various software platforms and products to support your specific design and experience management efforts. Continue reading about Crafter Software and the solutions it provides to help you even further. You may also like to stop by the Crafter Software booth at the upcoming Gilbane Conference in Boston, where Crafter Software is a gold sponsor! If you would like to provide feedback on this or any other program through EContent magazine, please drop me a line at [email protected]. Thanks again for reading! La Shawn Fugate, Publisher EContent magazine To advertise in this section, contact La Shawn Fugate, Publisher Phone: [email protected] mag.com

2 guided tours JARROD GINGRAS, REAL STORY GROUP A Guide to WCM Choosing the Right Tool for You In the late 1990s, when web content management (WCM) became a category of software, the focus was the content life cycle: create, edit, and deploy webpages. Original website managers were happy to simply see content appear on a website, and there wasn t much thought for the people on the other side of the screen. If content management used to be just about content, it s become much more than that now. Content is still king, but now, it s ruling with a very demanding queen: the end-user experience. Along the way, websites have become exponentially more complex. Software that used to just manage one-way publishing now at least attempts to support multidimensional web experiences whether in a public website context or on your enterprise intranet. In your search for a CMS package, you will find an increasingly confusing array of technology players. Despite persistent predictions of industry consolidation, the web CMS marketplace remains extraordinarily fragmented, characterized by a wide swath of midsize vendors and a sturdy set of open source projects. In addition to the commercial/open source divide, you can find software-asa-service (SaaS) players, regionally strong vendors, and those companies that focus intently on key sectors, such as higher education and government. In the Real Story Group s long-standing evaluations of the key vendors, we divide the marketplace into five segments, from most complex (and expensive) to simplest (and least functional). COMPLEX ENTERPRISE PLATFORM VENDORS These are large-scale platforms typically marketed as part of multidimensional suites that span many function points. These suites have tended to prove less well-suited for straightforward web CMS projects. And as a consequence, these products tend to be struggling in the marketplace right now. To be sure, the vendors themselves are mostly doing well selling their document management applications. For web content and experience management, these are very high-risk sources. UPPER-RANGE PLATFORMS Upper-range platforms occupy an expanding space between departmental installations and the traditional document management players. Relative to the latter tier, these vendors tend to be performing reasonably well in the marketplace right now. Perhaps the biggest difference between these products and the tier above them is their focus on WCM. Content is still king, but now, it s ruling with a very demanding queen: the end-user experience. On the plus side, their architectures can support reasonably extended and scalable projects. Note, however, that these platforms are typically not as out of the box as the midmarket offerings a tier below. You should expect integration costs to range from two to six times your licensing cost. These are not plug-and-play offerings. MIDRANGE PLATFORMS These offerings serve midmarket companies or departmental projects within larger enterprises. In particular, they target scenarios requiring above-average customization often requiring an outside consultant. So it s no surprise that this class of vendors tends to emphasize consulting partners and reseller channels, which means you, the customer, may be one step removed from the vendor. This will be a good or a bad thing, depending on your circumstances. This price/feature point appears to be quite popular right now, and these vendors have been reasonably successful at selling into large companies. That doesn t make them enterprise packages despite what the vendor may tell 4 ECONTENTMAG.COM

3 guided tours Complex Enterprise Platform Vendors EMC Corp. Documentum: Documentum Web Content Management HP/Autonomy: Interwoven TeamSite IBM: Web Content Manager OpenText Corp.: Web Experience Management Oracle: Universal Content Management you. No matter, they are pretty good at providing content management, but you should note that you are trading off against potential feature and scalability limitations. MIDRANGE PRODUCTS A key advantage of this class of products as a whole is that they tend to offer more prepackaged features. Many of them actively promote website-in-a-box solutions that include bundled social applications, analytics, and collaboration. This is particularly attractive if you are starting a new site from scratch and don t have pesky legacy content or pre-existing applications to address. They also tend to require fewer developmental resources. Note that you are trading off against potential feature and scalability limitations and that product application programming interfaces (APIs) almost certainly will not run as deep as those in the platform tiers. You can customize these tools to a point, but then, you re very much into uncharted territory. Although generally less expensive than the tiers above, fees can still creep upward, depending on the final number of servers required or contributors in the system. Therefore, be prepared to negotiate up front if you are going to need multiple environments. SIMPLER PRODUCTS These are smaller, albeit established vendors that come to the marketplace with packaged tools at attractive prices. However, the tools are not as feature-rich or extensible as their competitors. These packages tend to cater to do-it-yourself teams or smaller development shops, although the level of complexity varies among them. They tend to target use cases with fewer contributors, and therefore, they generally have somewhat underdeveloped workflow and role management subsystems. Consult Real Story Group for specific details on vendor pricing and product weaknesses and strengths. Upper-Range Platforms Adobe: CQ5 Alfresco Software, Inc. ECM CoreMedia AG: CMS Oracle: FatWire Content Server Percussion Software, Inc.: Percussion CMS SDL, PLC: Tridion Sitecore: Sitecore CMS Midrange Platforms Alterian Technology Ltd.: Content Manager Enterprise Edition Atex: Polopoly Drupal EPiServer AB: EPiServer CMS Hippo B.V.: Hippo CMS Microsoft: SharePoint 2010 OpenText: Web Solutions Plone Foundation: Plone TYPO3 Association: TYPO3 VYRE: Unify Midrange Products CrownPeak: CrownPeak CMS e-spirit AG: FirstSpirit Ektron, Inc.: CMS400.NET Enonic AS: Vertical Site Escenic: Escenic ez Systems AS: ez Publish GOSS: GOSS icm Hannon Hill Corp.: Cascade Server Ingeniux Corp.: Content Management System Limelight Networks: Dynamic Site Platform Magnolia International Ltd.: Magnolia Simpler Products Alkacon Software GmbH: OpenCms DNN: DotNetNuke Open Source Matters: Joomla! OmniUpdate, Inc.: OU Campus PaperThin, Inc.: CommonSpot SDL: Content Manager Corporate Edition Telerik: Sitefinity TerminalFour, Inc.: Site Manager WordPress Source: Real Story Group s evaluation research (realstorygroup.com/research/ channel/cms) Nov e m b e r 2013 EContent 5

4 sponsored content EContent magazine November 2013 WP7 Seven Keys to Web Content Management Success The evolution of the Web over the years has deeply immersed us into a new era of engagement, and leading enterprises must achieve higher levels of customer engagement across all of their online channels. Selecting the right Web Content Management system to build your solution upon is a critical component to its success. Now more than ever, your next WCM solution must enable you to fully manage and optimize the total Web experience of your target audience across all online digital channels. To do so, next generation WCM systems must deliver on the following Seven Keys of WCM Success. 1) Personalization Engaging your site visitors on a personalized, one-to-one basis is the most important capability of any modern WCM solution. Engagement is about maintaining an on-going bi-directional conversation with customers, and delivering targeted content when and where they need it. Your WCM solution must contain engagement features such as user personas, content targeting based on visitor profiles and behavior intelligence, and analytics to optimize the experience. 2) Ease of Integration To maximize the effectiveness of a targeted, personalized experience for your site visitors, you ll likely need to integrate with other enterprise systems within your organization -- CRM, ERP, Analytics, E-commerce, -- along with third party Web services such as social media and other cloud services. It is critical that your WCM solution have the ability to integrate with other systems without increasing complexity or reducing maintainability. 3) Multi-Channel Publishing The ability to publish to all online channels including one or more websites, mini- and micro- sites, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, mobile applications, among others is imperative to maintain engaging and consistent experiences. Your WCM platform needs to not only enable delivery of content in a way that s appropriate for each channel and all types of mobile devices, but also provide content authors with the ability to preview and optimize the experience for each channel. 4) Ease of Use As the amount of content produced increases, today s Web content teams need to move faster to keep up with the demands. Content producers and editors are managing multiple sites, in multiple languages, across various channels all the while trying to deliver engaging personalized experiences to multiple user personas. It s easy to see why a successful WCM implementation must provide them with easy-to-use tools that easily and quickly allow them to tackle daily challenges without the need for IT and other departments. 5) Developer Friendliness A great enterprise WCM system enables business users to perform their day-to-day content authoring and publishing activities without any support needed from developers. Content authors should be able to easily create and publish new content and even make basic content model and presentation-tier changes when necessary, without any IT involvement. At the same time, developers need an extensible platform that enables easy customization and support for standard, modern tools, so they can focus on innovation instead of being encumbered by older, heavy-weight, and outdated technologies. 6) High Performance A WCM can have all of the features in the world, but if it s unstable and doesn t produce a website that responds quickly, then basically it s dead from the start. Website responsiveness is directly tied to visitor engagement, customer loyalty, ultimately revenue. Many systems try to offload performance through caching and CDN strategies, which make sense as part of a complete solution. But your base WCM system still needs to perform under high load, or you will not be able to deliver personalized experiences. Your WCM solution needs to perform well with a small footprint, and it must scale out simply without adding a lot of cost and complexity. 7) Open An open WCM platform drives the agility that enterprises need today to respond at the speed of the Web. The primary characteristics of an open WCM platform include: Open Content In this era of engagement, you will find your content delivered on many different types of devices and distributed across the Internet via blogs, social networks, and other services. That s why it s so important to allow content to flow freely in and out of your content management system, and clearly separate your content from any specific presentation. Open Architecture Each organization has unique demands that result in their own unique requirements. Architecturally, a decoupled system with a separate delivery technology allows content authors to have the best, most efficient tools available, without losing focus on serving audiences across all channels. Open Source Every enterprise WCM system implementation requires customization and development to some degree. Open source improves development efficiency and effectiveness while driving innovation. Next generation WCM solutions that deliver on these Seven Keys to Success Personalization, Ease of Integration, Multi-Channel Publishing, Ease of Use, Developer Friendliness, High-Performance, and Open provide enterprises with the agility and robustness that is necessary for creating and optimizing the rich and engaging site visitor experiences that meet the demands of the modern Web user.

5 WP8 November 2013 EContent magazine s Solutions Directory sponsored content Directory to Web Content Management To advertise in this section, contact LA SHAWN FUGATE Publisher Phone: [email protected] CRAFTER SOFTWARE CORPORATION 1800 Alexander Bell Drive Suite 400 Reston, VA 20191, USA craftersoftware.com Crafter Software provides commercial support for the awardwinning CrafterCMS open source project, which was built from the ground up as a modern platform for creating more relevant web experiences through targeted delivery of personalized content. Crafter enables business users to build and optimize engaging experiences across all digital channels. FUTURE ADVERTISING DEADLINES: Cover Date Deadline Jan/Feb /11/13 March /14/14 April /10/ Old Marlton Pike Medford, NJ econtentmag.com An Essential Field Guide to Web 2.0 Technology Have you ever reviewed a book at Amazon.com? Uploaded a photo to Flickr? Commented on a blog posting? Used tags to describe or access information? If you have, you ve contributed user-generated content (UContent) to the web. But while many librarians and information professionals have accepted their roles as creators and managers of UContent, many have not. This comprehensive text considers the reasons behind UContent s wild popularity and makes strong arguments for cultivating it. While describing his own UContent experiences, the author has prepared a well-researched book that serves as an overview, a status report, a primer, and a prognostication. The chapters are full of examples, insights, tips, and illustrations designed to help you process, administer, and enjoy the UContent phenomenon. By Nicholas G. Tomaiuolo ISBN pp/$49.50 Available wherever books and ebooks are sold, or call: (800) or (609) infotoday.com 143 Old Marlton Pike Medford, NJ 08055