What Is Crazier Than Enterprise Search? Maybe Content Management Systems?

May 4, 2022

I met a content management system guru many years ago. He explained to me in a remarkably patronizing way that CMS was the future of enterprise content. The words “all” and the phrase “search is just a utility” still echo when I think of him.

He was incorrect. CMS is certainly not a replacement for an XML repository which can “point” to objects like a sales presentation which began life as a PowerPoint and then emerged as a nifty PDF for the 20 somethings in marketing.

CMS, in my view, boils down to clunky systems which allow different people with a wide range of cognitive content to create, retrieve, and do stuff with text and some art. Search remains pretty darned crazy as a market sector, but there are some open source options and a number of semi-useful cloud services. The tendency for art history majors to bandy the word “all” in chats about a CMS continues to make me laugh. Right, “all”. What about company videos on RuTube.ru? I am waiting for an answer.

There is something that CMS is quite skilled. “Vulnerable Plugins Plague the CMS Website Security Landscape” states:

According to the researchers, vulnerable plugins and extensions “account for far more website compromises than out-of-date, core CMS files,” with roughly half of website intrusions recorded by the firm’s clients occurring on a domain with an up-to-date CMS. Threat actors will often leverage legitimate — but hijacked — websites to host malware, credit card skimmers, or for the deployment of spam.

Thank goodness these CMS cannot index “all” content, which limits breach risks to some degree.

Quite an attack surface: Art history majors versus the bad actors with engineering degrees from a technical university or an enterprising coder who dropped out of school to sell his services via Aletenen.

Stephen E Arnold, May 4, 2022

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