Content Management Vendors: We Do Social Stuff Too
June 30, 2008
After a wonderful flight with exceptional service from caring airline employees, I had to read this headline twice to make sure I wasn’t in some state of delirium. The headline is “Content Management Software Vendors Eye Social Networking”. The essay is authored by Larry Dignan, and he does a great job of catching my attention. This headline and essay are keepers.
The key point to me is:
In other words, social networking will become a generic enterprise feature at some point. These CMS players can develop their own community suites (and hire staff that understands the social types), acquire white label networks or just hang back.
The trigger for this story is a consultant report. I can’t recall which firm stuffed full of pundits came up with this observation, but I think there is some truth to content management vendors’ chasing the rainbow of social search, social content, social chit chat, and social anything.
The reason is not far to seek. CMS is a faux application that often doesn’t work very and always costs a lot more than the customer anticipated. I used to write about CMS applications, but after I had to do some clean up in two Federal agencies when systems went off the rails, I just stopped paying attention to the vendors in this software sector.
Content management is software that tries to convert companies that don’t know much about publishing into publishers. As part of the deal, employees who are not skilled writers will get some help to become more information literate. The CMS then tries to keep track of versions, enforce security, output Web pages, and perform levitation.
Why not include social functions? Social software is as much a part of CMS as any other software function. If you can’t make a system better, just make it bigger, more complex, and more trendy. The reason enterprise publishing systems are gaining traction is a result of the opportunities CMS has created with their over-hyped assertions.
Enterprise search is disappointing. CMS is disappointing as well. Instead of delivering a solution that works, just add social features. Sounds like the enterprise software industry is up
Agree? Disagree?
Stephen Arnold, June 30, 2008
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Hi Stephen, I remember meeting up with you some time ago when you were covering CMSs and fully agree with you that CMSs are an artificial construct and I still struggle to see their relevance.
We evolved Affino into becoming a fully fledged eBusiness Suite five years ago, since we believe the key to successful websites is being able to earn revenues through them and not simply for them to act as promotional tools.
The CMS market, in particular the web CMS market has become a commodity with the advent of tools such as Joomla (which is very easy to use) and Alfresco, but the need to make everything simpler is a two-way tug-of-war between working on new interfaces, wizards and automation which make it easier for users to publish, and there is no doubt that many Web 2.0 solutions are highly usable, and the needs of corporations and organisations to have highly tailored sites which match their corporate aims.
The advent of Flex in particular but also Ajax is allowing vendors to make much more usable interfaces We’re going through the exercise of making all our interfaces far more usable and intuitive by creating dynamic drag-and-drop / real-time Flex apps to do the tasks which were previously the most time-consuming.
My personal belief, and one which I’ve had for years, is that the CMS itself will become redundant over the next five to ten years or so and be replaced by fully fledged business suites which allow companies to achieve their business goals on-line and not simply publish content.
Markus Karlsson
Yes, I remember. Please write me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com and let me know what you are doing. I think enterprise software is in for a major shake up. As I recall, you were ahead of the curve with your London based company.
Stephen Arnold, October 2, 2008