CMS Hardtalk

I remember six years back when we were introducing the CMS application domain. Remember I said that the CMS was the "mouse in the company" could get into places where other systems was prohibited to go. At that time web wasn’t that important a medium as it is today. Of course the systems was more fragile and more buggy than the more mature CMS on the market today, but all in all they really could go places where CRM, ERP and DM could’nt.

Today the market is different. Web is in fact a medium of major importance and also forms the basis of the the new development and service platform of Google. What I have experienced in the last two years is that when the major CMS companies has matured and stabilized and generalized their architecture more and more customers have had difficulties in keeping up technologically in their internal development departments. It is about the systems have grown so general that even doing a small extension or integration requires really good insight into the product architecture.

It is more difficult to track the origin of bugs and the companies become more and more dependent of external expert resources.

As I see it some systems has grown into elephants in the company. They have become the "SAP of CMS". As I wrote on my blog on Computerworld (in danish) this has been the chance for the wiki’s and other social software to penetrate some of the CMS market, especially regarding intranets and extranets.

As a good example we could take Sharepoint Portal Server (MOSS 2007)  that a lot of customers is very dissatisfied with at the moment. Tremendous efforts to change even simple functionality and changing the default design is not that simple as it was supposed to be. In fact the Office Sharepoint platform also tries to cover a huge broad target client group and have to be very general and at the same time be able to handle/integrate both Document Management (DM), Business Intelligence(BI) etc. That’s a challenge. To be fair we also have to mention an Open Source  CMS/framework like ZOPE that also started with CMS intentions but also soon grow to big and general to handle. Plone (a CMS build on top of the Zope Framework) had more appeal at the clients.

My main point is that perhaps the clients dont want the huge generalized "Enterprise Systems". The right balance between spaghetti coding, simple architecture and good documentation together with usable error messages would be more usable, right? Give a shot of "Community Spice" and perhaps we have back the agile CMS for the Agile company / organisation.