Content Management and Search
September 25, 2008
On the wonderful USAir red eye from San Francisco to Charlotte, I did some thinking about the SharePoint content managment information I picked up at the Information Today three-for-one conference in San Jose, California, tihs week. A number of vendors were offereing systems that would help users create Web content, management digital media, and locate information regardless of where it was stored in an enterprise.
I don’t want to single out any vendors. Most of the people manning the exhibits were uniformly happy. I found myself confused because since the 2007 show I saw familiar faces working in competitors’ booths. What had happened was that sales professionals changed jobs. I found myself trying to get my mind around the revolving doors at some of the CMS industry’s largest companies.
Here are the thoughts that stuck in my mind as I relaxed in the lavishness of USAir’s coach class seat:
- We’re back to portals. A number of vendors focused on providing a dashboard interface to content. The idea was that if you did a key word search and drew a big fat zero, you could look at a list of suggestions, charts, and categories. I thought the portal craze had burned itself out, but I was looking at 2001 interfaces with jazzier graphics and no significant improvement in functionality.
- Indexing without the benefit of subject matter experts. I saw many systems that purported to process SharePoint content, assign what’s called “rich metadata”, and make it easy to locate the document a user needs within a SharePoint system. I watched demonstrations that worked, but when i tried my queries, the results “sort of” worked. For me, “sort of” is a marginal improvement over “does not” work. Most of the systems on offer remain works in progress.
- Desperate sellers, desperate buyers. Someone tried to get me to take a CMS map. I don’t need a map to document how N-compass became the finely crafted wackiness of SharePoint. My queries did not work, so I don’t have too much interest in history. I want relevance. The impression I formed was that desperate sellers were trying to woo desperate buyers. The buzzwords ripped through the air with such ferocity that I was mesmerized.
CMS is broken, possibly irreparably. CMS joins “enterprise search” as an enterprise application that once seemed essential, yet has proved to be expensive to implement and deeply dissatisfying. The ranks of the CMS vendors and the CMS systems managers are likely to be thinner in 2009. Consultants are doing their level best to squeeze dollars from the desperate. But the software category looks uncertain to me. Agree? Disagree? I want to hear from alleged CMS gurus. Help me learn.
Stephen Arnold, September 25, 2008
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2 Responses to “Content Management and Search”
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“CMS is broken” is a very sweeping statement. Some CMS’ are better than others, but the acronym describes a range of software from ‘simple’ Web Content Management Systems (which include blog and wiki platforms) via document and records management products to the big ‘suites’ of ECM vendors.
So if you take a particular CMS in a particular use case scenario, it may well be ‘broken’ if it does not meet the enterprises strategic needs, and the users more tactical needs. However if we want to improve search, but improving the ‘findability’ of our nuggets of information, should we not look to the CMS to help structure our content and manage the metadata ? Our do we take a ‘throw it all in one big bucket’ approach and rely on full text indexing and text analytics ?
All in all I dont think CMS / content management is broken, but then I regard Sharepoint (MOSS 2007) a s portal platform and not as a CMS / ECMS.
Jed Cawthorne
Thanks for taking time to express your point of view. I appreciate it.
Stephen Arnold, October 6, 2008