CMS Watch Web Content Management Feed

Interwoven prospers as Vignette continues to bleed

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:59:00 -0400

Vignette and Interwoven have released their second-quarter 2008 results, and it's a study in contrasts.

With Interwoven, the news is essentially all good. License revenue for the quarter was up 11 percent (to $23.4 million) over the same quarter a year ago, while service and support revenue grew 18 percent. Overall, gross profit jumped a solid 16 percent in Q2 2008 versus Q2 2007. First-half gross profit was likewise up 16 percent year over year. Net profit soared 78 percent (Q2 2008 vs. Q2 2007), and on a six-month basis the year-over-year jump was 53 percent.

Certainly some of the top-line revenue growth came from recent acquisitions, but any way you slice it, those are some pretty impressive numbers.

Vignette, meanwhile, continues on its sad downward trajectory. The company saw license revenue fall to $9.9 million for Q2 of this year, from $14.6 million in the same period last year. Services actually grew slightly, however (to $35.8 million from $33.4 year-ago). Gross profit was similarly down. But more ominously, net income went negative. The company reported a loss of a little over $863,000 in Q2 of this year, compared to a net gain of $4 million in Q2 of 2007.

What makes the Vignette story so sad is that the firm does not lack for talented people (nor technological vision). What's lacking is an ability to land new deals at the kind of rate that will stop the financial bleeding. It's also a matter of battling ASP (average sales price) deterioration.

We've been seeing indications for some time that Vignette is under strong pricing pressure. In the recent earnings call (transcript available at SeekingAlpha.com), CFO Pat Kelly may have unwittingly provided a valuable data point on this. He notes that Vignette's ASP was $211K in Q2, versus $249K in Q1. (He ascribed the difference to "normal volatility in that metric.") The problem with averages, of course, is that a single abnormally high value can sway the overall average upward, giving a potentially misleading result. (This is why people often use median values rather than averages.) Tellingly, Kelly noted that Vignette scored three large deals in excess of $1 million during Q2. It doesn't take a math genius to see the implication of this. Quite simply put: It means the majority of Q2 deals came in at less than $211K. Maybe far less.

Headcount reduction is usually the first tactic a company resorts to when attempting to arrest a downtrend in profitability. But ironically, headcount-trimming costs money in the near term. (It's not unusual for personnel-related "restructuring" costs to come to $50K per employee.) In the course of the earnings call, Vignette's Somesh Singh, SVP of R&D and Technical Operations, verified that a charge of $2.5 to $3 million would probably be taken soon, due to severance costs.

Other Vignette executives hinted at re-allocating resources internally. As ECM Suites Report readers know, Vignette sells a broad line of different tools. Attention will surely shift internally, though it's too soon to know exactly how.

We'll keep you posted.

No easy upgrade for Sitecore customers

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:18:00 -0400

While Web CMS vendor Sitecore has been busy promoting the new user interface in its recently released Version 6, the company has attracted quite a bit of criticism from existing customers for the new version's lack of an easy upgrade path.

In a recent blog posting by Sitecore's VP of Technical Marketing, Lars Nielsen, he discusses their upgrade strategy and explains the company's choice between delaying the release of Sitecore 6 or let the database conversion tool follow afterwards. Similar to many other vendors in this situation, e.g., Microsoft, Sitecore decided to get the new product out the door and worry about upgrades later.

The definition of immediately afterwards may extend beyond the 2 months that have transpired since V6 came out, but I see that Sitecore themselves have still not upgraded their very own website. According to Sitecore, an alpha release of the upgrade tool is expected this week, but there is no news on when customers can expect a final release.

Regardless of vendor, upgrades are never straightforward, and you typically want to wait until the vendor has gone through the pain itself before teaching them the ropes. In this case, though, it is telling that Sitecore -- a vendor with a support model that we have previously questioned -- has focused more on pleasing new prospective customers and less critical analysts alike with exciting new demos rather than supporting its faithful customers. If the past is any guide, do remember to budget and plan any upgrade carefully.

A new (and wearable) Content Technologies Subway Map

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:55:00 -0400

A new season brings an updated vendor map:

We added a Yellow Line -- for XML & Component Content Management vendors, and reflected some other station changes.

And now, if you like what you see, you and your wall can wear it. Our new store at Cafe Press offers t-shirt and posters of various sizes, along with other CMS Watch tchotchkes.

Regarding the latter, perhaps you already own your fill of mugs and mousepads, but can you ever have enough beer steins? Bring it to the next event where we're speaking and we'll fill it up with the closest available brew. ;-)

Web UI development: inherently slow?

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:49:00 -0400

In a thoughtful post at JavaLobby, developer Ali Loghmani poses a simple but important question: Why is Web UI development so slow?

Here, Loghmani is not just talking about the creation and placement of AJAX widgets on web pages. He is talking about full-cycle development and testing of web and portlet interfaces that integrate with popular MVC webapp frameworks such as Grails, Django, Tapestry, or any of a slew of others.

The reason this is an important question, of course, is that people write custom web and intranet apps against their DAM, WCM, ECM, and Portal systems all the time, whether for public-facing B2C apps or just to create a CMS front-end that content contributors will actually use. And it is invariably a resource-intensive process. Gobs of time, money, and engineering talent go into the creation of web interfaces (and the code that binds those interfaces to back-end business logic).

Loghmani laments the protracted program-test-debug time in development frameworks that require (as many do) redeployment of files to an appserver before changes can be previewed. This is certainly a problem. It's one thing to do an eye-pleasing mockup of an AJAX webform in a browser; quite another to wire it into JSF and do full-cycle debugging in WebSphere, say, or JBoss (or whatever).

There's also the perennial cross-browser compatibility bugaboo. Web UIs tend (still) to perform differently in different browsers, necessitating ugly "browser-check" code with parallel logic branches to handle the various browser types and their legacy quirks. Writing and testing this kind of code takes time.

Of course, to some degree UI development is an inherently hard problem. The mapping of widget states to program states is not always straightforward. To the contrary, the possible permutations are more often than not incalculable, and the potential side-effects legion. You can't expect this kind of programming to go quickly.

In the end, Loghmani argues that the sheer complexity of popular MVC frameworks is a major (perhaps the major) contributor to long UI development times. As much as I value simplicity, I have to disagree here. In my experience, complexity is not a bad thing per se if you can properly hide it. Twenty years ago, three-person crews were the norm on airliners. Today it's almost entirely two-person crews. Ironically, the airplanes have gotten much more complex, but the human interface has been refined to the point where you no longer need a "flight engineer." This is an example of how complexity can be hidden, to good effect.

I think one could argue that the main reason Web UI development is slow is because insufficient tooling exists to make it quick and easy. Things like Tapestry and JSF (and appservers) are complex, with many moving parts. Developers are constantly having to open the hood and make hand adjustments to rather intricate machinery, using only basic hand-tools.

In the post-2.0 world, that won't do. Time is too precious. We're going to need better tools -- or perhaps an entirely new development paradigm. Old-school MVC development, à la Struts and all the rest, is just not cost-effective any more. If indeed it ever was.

Start flossing your content now

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:08:00 -0400

Nobody likes content migrations. But they're inevitable. Like trips to the dentist.

You can perhaps reduce your pain by reading this nifty little white paper, "Content migration: options and strategies," by James Robertson of StepTwo Designs. It's a wonderfully concise survey of your likely toothaches and options for dealing with them.

James is not optimistic about outsourcing the migration project, but as others have pointed out, staffing depends on how you organize the effort, and there is potentially a role for temporary help.

You'll also want to pay close attention to the question of metadata. Oftentimes enterprises implement a new system in order to employ tag intelligence for publishing and navigation. Someone knowledgeable needs to add all those tags -- at least as part of the final migration QA process. Like transforming the content itself, you'll find automated classification tools a mixed bag at best.

Everyone can agree though, that the more attention you pay to regularly cleaning up your content beforehand, the more likely this particular dentist visit will prove less painful.

We're looking to hire a Web Content Management Technology Analyst

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:58:00 -0400

CMS Watch is looking for someone who suffers from a variant of our particular obsessive disorder: a passionate interest in how content technologies really work.

Specifically, we're seeking a WCM technology analyst, who could think of no better job than to debrief Web CMS customers and integrators and share (in print and in person) what they learned about the tools with the rest of the world.

Narrowcasting to your feed aggregator

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:39:00 -0400

We're pleased that CMS Watch now covers ten different technologies, but I suspect that many of you take an interest in only one or two families of tools. If that's you, here's a list of technology-specific RSS feeds that will just send relevant postings to your reader or aggregator.

Digital Asset Management: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/DAM

ECM Suites: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/ECM

E-mail Archiving & Management: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/E-mail

Enterprise Portals: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/Portal

Enterprise Search: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/Search

SharePoint: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/SharePoint

Social Software: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/Social

Web Analytics: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/Analytics

Web CMS / WCM: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/CMS

XML & Component Content Management: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/CCM

Interwoven and the Gartner WCM MarketScope

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:25:00 -0400

Gartner's recent "MarketScope for Web Content Management" has predictably garnered a lot of attention from vendors happy with their position in the ratings chart. I have a mixed reaction.

Specifically, I'll take issue with Interwoven's "Strong Positive" rating. I've been following the company for ten years now, and this is what I think. Interwoven as a company and the extended TeamSite product management team in particular are still some of the best briefer/demo-givers in the industry. They perpetually tell what analysts call a great "story." What we've uncovered on the ground is a rather different story: a set of very expensive WCM tools running off a highly dated technology platform, often requiring excessive customization that can be detrimental to your longterm website health. For a complete scrub of Interwoven's TeamSite/LiveSite line, check out the free sample featuring that evaluation, from our Web CMS Report 2008.

On the plus side, I think Gartner' MarketScope format is much more nuanced than the Magic Quadrant. Still, I think horserace-style analysis like this can become counterproductive, since it assumes that all Web CMS technology buyers are racing towards the same goal, with the same budget, in the same country, with the same website profile. That's simply not the case.

It is healthier for everyone, though, that Gartner has lowered the bar for vendor participation ($10m in sales) and therefore expanded the pool of covered vendors to seventeen. I think the marketplace is even flatter and more distributed than that (which is why we cover forty, with more coming), and open source WCM has a much more significant footprint in the enterprise than Gartner allows. But it's good to see major analyst firms (Forrester, too) returning repeatedly to WCM after occasionally dismissing it while riding ECM and Social Software waves.

As long as enterprises publish websites and intranets, they will need ever more capable Web CMS tools. We'll keep watching closely.

SaaS Web CMS vendor Marqui going belly up?

jgingras@cmswatch.com(Jarrod Gingras) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:51:00 -0400

I follow several Software as a Service (SaaS) web content management vendors for the The Web CMS Report. This includes SaaS vendors Clickability, CrownPeak, OmniUpdate and Marqui, a small SaaS-based content management and campaign management vendor headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. In the last version of The Web CMS Report 2008, we recommended that potential buyers of Marqui "perform due diligence before signing deals." While this is good advice when preparing to make any software acquisition, Marqui's previous management overhauls and financial secrecy presented warning signs of potential financial difficulty.

Recently, I was alerted to TechVibes' news that Marqui was in receivership (Investopedia defines receivership as: "A type of bankruptcy a company enters when a receiver is appointed by bankruptcy courts or creditors to run the company.").

Our multiple attempts at contacting Marqui through calls and e-mails have been unreturned. To date, there has been no official communication from Marqui. There have been no Marqui press releases since March and no blog entries on their company blog since September of 2007. Customers we've contacted have remained mum.

One of the arguments against the adoption of a SaaS CMS is exactly this scenario: what happens to my content if my SaaS provider goes out of business? You can typically export all your content via XML, but that's only a part of your web publishing effort, which includes templates, layouts, access controls, and so forth, all of which need to be recreated in a different system. It remains to be seen what will happen to Marqui and how their clients will fare, but buyers certainly need to do their digging on financial stability of any Web CMS partner.

The other lesson here is not to assume that outside funding will automatically improve a vendor's long-term viability. Marqui somehow blew through a considerable investment of approximately $11 million in venture capital, without much to show for it but a long list of creditors.

We will continue to do some digging of our own to find out Marqui's plan for their existing customers.

Bam, WAM, thank you, DAM!

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 9 Jul 2008 15:36:00 -0400

Late last month I had the pleasure of attending the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium in London, UK, where I presented a summary of our research recently published in The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008. It was interesting to contrast this event with Henry Stewart's other recent DAM event, in New York City, held in early May. While many of the challenges faced by digital asset managers on both sides of the Atlantic are similar, few vendors find success on both continents. Though most of the vendors in our report claim customers "worldwide," a true presence (meaning more than a sales person) beyond the headquarters is usually lacking -- oftentimes, the software is simply pushed by resellers abroad, with minimal success.

Unlike last year, Canadian vendors North Plains and Nstein had their footprint on the London show floor, while Artesia ( who was there last year) was notably missing. Otherwise, ADAM, Vyre and other smaller UK and Europe-based vendors continued to fulfill the need of their local markets, and look to expand. As I noted along with my colleague Alan at Internet World UK back in April, there's no shortage of small to medium-sized WCM vendors doing well in the UK market, either, and many have yet to venture even into continental Europe. For every vendor that's acquired an gobbled up, two or three new ones seem to emerge, fulfilling ever more specific micro-niches. Perhaps the "Go Local" trend isn't just about food anymore, but technology suppliers as well.

But talk in the conference rooms was more about the business challenges of broadcasters, designers, marketers, and publishers than it was about the tools and vendors themselves. What echoed most frequently at both conferences was the idea of DAM not just as an asset repository, but a set of workflows leading to an end product (be it a brochure, catalog, or 60-minute broadcast). Each step along the workflow should add value, be it metadata enrichment or some artistic or editorial improvement. And yet, as we've pointed out before, most tools fall short of allowing licensees to truly automate and expedite the often complex publishing processes required by typical DAM scenarios.

It's in this spirit that Chris Glynne, who recently started his own consultancy called Bold Visions, pitched the concept of WAM, or Workflow Asset Management. While the last thing we all need is another acronym, if we're going to take DAM beyond the concept of a digital library, focusing on workflow, and the automation of steps along the typical DAM path is one key way of making that happen.

Digital asset managers asked me a lot of questions about non-pure-play DAM vendors' DAM capabilities. From Alfresco to Microsoft to Oracle, conference delegates wanted to know if they really needed a pure-play DAM tool if they already had SharePoint or Oracle's UCM. That question is not easily answered without delving deeper and understanding your needs and business scenarios. Do you have digital assets that are larger than 5 MB? Do your assets require you to manage both individual and composite assets, such as an product image, and then a brochure where the image might be used, and subsequently a 250-page product catalog where it might be applied as well? Do you need to manage and use the same asset at various resolutions, for both the Web and print? Then SharePoint sure as heck won't do the trick, and you'd be stretching other non-DAM-specific tools. Specialized DAM vendors raison d'être is to fulfill needs like these.

I'll share more leanings from these two DAM events as the summer continues; feel free to email me with any DAM or MAM questions you may have as well, as we continue our research into this fast-changing technology.

Adobe's brave new stack

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Tue, 8 Jul 2008 12:46:00 -0400

Over at the Adobe Developer Connection website, Belgian developer Sebastien Arbogast has posted an interesting article (a tutorial of sorts) on how to write next-generation web apps in Flex. What's interesting isn't the Flex part (or the demo app itself, which is rather uninspired) but the underlying stack, which gives some hint, I think, of what Adobe's Flex evangelistas may be envisioning as LAMP-Next. It's a combination of Flex (for the presentation layer), BlazeDS (for messaging and presence), Spring (the runtime framework), Hibernate (for persistence), and MySQL (data layer). The application server used in Arbogast's example happens to be JBoss, but it could just as easily be something else.

Arbogast's example-app is just a tiny taste of what's possible. A slightly more interesting demo built using these technologies is the collaborative webform built by Adobe's own Christophe Coenraets (who gives a code walkthrough here). Two or more people can work on this form collaboratively in their respective browsers, from separate locations. Any resulting edits are visible to all participants. Mind you, it's nothing that can't be done right now using HTML and AJAX. But the point is, this is Adobe's idea of what's next (something quite a bit Flashier and less HTML-feeling).

Anyone who thinks Adobe's aspirations in areas like ECM, WCM, and DAM are limited to the recent much-ballyhooed OEM deal with Alfresco is missing the point. Adobe's goals are far loftier. Adobe, it seems, wants nothing less than to make its content technologies as pervasive as ... the Web itself. Even if it has to assemble a new stack to get there.

White paper on SharePoint for public websites

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 2 Jul 2008 11:07:00 -0400

We've critiqued SharePoint's rather awkward web publishing capabilities in different evaluation reports (on Web CMS tools and SharePoint itself). But we also see customers who seek to deploy SharePoint for their public websites, either because they want to experiment with the platform, or because the business side is being forced to use it (often under the misimpression that it will be "free").

The latter case is a bit ironic, because for years some enterprise web teams had to put up with bloated Web CMS tools from the likes of Documentum or IBM in a mistaken effort by IT to overreach and standardize on a single ECM supplier. Now we sometimes see IT throwing SharePoint over the wall to the business as almost a kind of abdication of any involvement.

But using SharePoint for traditional web publishing is not a trivial undertaking. If you go that route, I'll commend you to a very useful white paper published by our partners at J. Boye, which offers some best practices in deploying SharePoint for web publishing. If you've already decided to take the plunge (or someone has decided for you), "Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites - A Business Person's Guide" can help you sort out how you should (and should not) proceed.

Some of the advice is germane to any web publishing automation effort, but that's exactly the point: whatever its unique particularities, employing SharePoint does not suspend the need for essential project management. If anything, the complexity of the platform and array of implementation choices puts a premium on dotting your i's and crossing your t's.

Oracle's new plan to save you money

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:53:00 -0400

There's something vaguely Orwellian, at times, about the language that turns up in quarterly and annual reports (the kind U.S. public corporations are required to file with the Security and Exchange Commission). Remember the classic slogans from Orwell's 1984? War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Perhaps we should now add, "Higher prices mean lower cost of ownership."

I'm reading a well-known software company's quarterly report dated April 1, 2008, wherein the following rather noble-sounding statements are made:

"We have focused on lowering the total cost of ownership of our software products by improving integration, decreasing installation times, lowering administration costs and improving the ease of use. Reducing the total cost of ownership of our products provides our customers with a higher return on their investment, which we believe will create more demand and provide us with a competitive advantage."

This comes from a company that many consider to be a master of extortionate pricing. And indeed, what makes the foregoing passage so Orwellian is that the company recently increased its prices across-the-board by an average of 15 percent. I'm talking, of course, about Oracle.

Prior to last week, Universal Content Management 10gR3 sold for $100K (plus $22K per year for maintenance and support). The same software is now $115K (plus $25,300/yr for maintenance and support). Note how the higher license engine pulls a bigger support caboose.

Oracle's BPEL Process Manager product was $50K before the price increase. It is now $60K.

The Event Driven Architecture Suite has gone from $60K to $70K.

Fusion Middleware adaptors that were $30K are now $34.5.

In fairness, many (perhaps most) of the products on Oracle's price list have acquired new features over the past year, and so one could argue that the price increases merely translate to "you get what you pay for."

On the other hand, software is an extraordinarily competitive business. Enterprise customers have ever-higher expectations as to feature richness, quality, and adherence to industry standards. In fact, some people (i.e., users of open-source software) expect to pay nothing for the bits and bytes, and only a modest amount for support.

Oracle isn't going in the pay-just-for-support direction, of course. New software licenses account for a third of Oracle's business. It intends to grow that side of the business, organically as well as through acquisitions -- including acquisitions of direct competitors. And guess who gets to foot the bill?

But don't worry. Remember, your total cost of ownership is going down. Well, at least it was going down, until your vendor recaptured the savings with higher license fees...

A Tale of Two Days at Web Content 2008

jgingras@cmswatch.com(Jarrod Gingras) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:55:00 -0400

Here are some wrap-up thoughts from a couple of days at the Web Content 2008 conference in Chicago last week. I thought there was a fascinating dichotomy between days 1 and 2 of the conference (at least in the sessions that I attended.) I'm not sure if the conference organizers intentionally positioned the talks like this, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Day 1 was a crash course in Web 2.0 offerings, with speakers exciting the sold-out crowd by talking about releasing control of your brand, letting users create your content, hypersyndication, and the new rules of marketing. Attendees left all fired up about the possibility of using Social Software in their enterprises.

Day 2, however, was a jarring jolt back to reality. The day began with Human Factors International's Jerome Nadel talking about the necessity of employing tried and true usability testing best practices, and then Welchman Consulting's Lisa Welchman claiming that Web 2.0 efforts will fail without employing governance practices through Web Operations Management. These keynotes were then followed by several presentations (including my own) on the pitfalls and trappings of any software selection and implementation endeavor.

So, the conference served as a microcosm for the state of the current Social Software industry. There is certainly fervor in the marketplace to adopt Social Software in the enterprise. However, we are seeing many enterprises quickly jump into the Social Software arena without performing the proper due diligence that they would with other enterprise software like Web Content Management, Enterprise Content Management, or Enterprise Search. Our research for The Enterprise Social Software Report 2008 showed that many early adopters of social software are encountering unforeseen pitfalls when implementing these tools, even as they reap obvious benefits as well. Lesson: do not lose sight of proper best practices when it comes to selecting, implementing, and managing social software.

I am a firm believer that Social Software is here to stay and can be extremely powerful within the enterprise. However, like any new technology, there is bound to be some growing pains. The extent of these pains will almost certainly be mitigated by how enterprises are able to apply the lessons learned from other content technologies. Social Software seems revolutionary, but many of the same rules apply.

Web CMS Thoughts from Gilbane Day One

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:48:00 -0400

After participating in the first day of the Gilbane San Francisco conference yesterday, here some short observations in no particular order.

By my count, once-little Ektron has seen four years of hyper-growth. The company says they now have 200 employees. If accurate, I'll guess this head-count puts them at about US$30-40m in revenues, which sizes Ektron in the ball-park of some of the larger standalone Web CMS vendors (like FatWire, or Tridion before the SDL acquisition), or even the CMS product groups of some larger vendors. You're probably not surprised to hear that Ektron customers tell us this growth has not come without associated growth pains.

Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz, who once worked on SharePoint Portal Server 2003 at Microsoft, called the MOSS 2007 platform a "collection of festering boils." You can ask him for clarification, but he seems to have meant it with love...

Speaking of SharePoint, two channel partners told me that their local Microsoft reps were marketing MOSS for public websites really hard. Evidently Redmond wants to beat the rap that the tool is not ideal for public-facing sites, and doubtless would like to lengthen this customer list. So the integrators are asking themselves, "when Microsoft hands us a great lead to follow, how can we have a candid conversation with the prospect about their real alternatives?" Not a new story in the channel business, but a pressing one right now, and you the buyer should understand the institutional dynamics. See, this presents you a bit of a dilemma as well: ideally you'd find a vendor-neutral consultant to help you sort out your choices, but if MOSS wins your competition in the end, you really want to go with a partner who brings very deep skills in Web Publishing in SharePoint, because it's not a simple beast. If Redmond keeps pushing its partners, then "vendor neutral with very deep SharePoint skills" could become an oxymoron.

If the exhibit hall is any indication, the Web CMS marketplace continues to expand, especially at the lower end -- perhaps dispelling the myth of a SharePoint steamroller, at least in this space. Smaller vendors here -- some of whom have participated for multiple events now -- include Acumium, Bridgeline, Broadchoice, Hippo, Telerik, and The Level, plus many of the other usual suspects we cover in our Web CMS Report 2008.

Of course, exhibitors come and go from year to year. One thing doesn't change though. Despite all the talk about Web 2.0, a lot of customers bring some very basic questions they want addressed about web publishing and CMS tools. I hope I can answer some of them at my tutorial tomorrow.

Web CMS versus Social Software?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:10:00 -0400

People frequently ask me about where their Web Publishing efforts should end and Social Software begin. Like so many things, the answer is, "it depends." For example, one important question is whether you are talking about intranets versus a public site, which will likely exhibit very different interaction and security models.

I can certainly understand the confusion. Our recent research on Web CMS and Enterprise Social Software suggests a definite overlap from a tools perspective. But our research also found most Web CMS tools coming up short when it comes to deeper forms of Social Networking and Collaboration. (See today's press release for more details).

Meanwhile, most Social Software tools lack -- in some cases deliberately lack -- the sort of heavier-duty systems and administrative services that you would want behind an enterprise website.

Some enthusiasts argue that multidimensional platforms (like Drupal or SharePoint, to name just two) give you the best of both worlds. I disagree. But perhaps it's best to look at this less as a competition between two different types of software and more as distinct approaches to addressing two rather different objectives: one for enabling the publishing of "official" information, and the other supporting the creation and social interaction around unofficial content.

For most cases in most enterprises today, I think this means investing in two (or more) different types of tools to get you there.