CMS Hardtalk

Today I was at a small come together at Videndanmark (a network of people dealing with Knowledge Management/Leadership in Denmark).

Usually I hate going to seminars but I had to meet Pruzak when he visited Denmark/Copenhagen today.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the meeting was a dialogue. No Power points. As he said "Power point is the enemy of learning". 

Some people was disappointed because he didn’t talk about how the tools to share knowledge (e.g. Wiki’s, Blogs, CMS etc.) has effected the "Social" worker. I was glad that we had a good discussion about the broader perspectives and aspects of Knowledge.

My notes from the meeting:

Whats going on? The monopoly of knowledge has disappeared, and countries and minor companies now know how to deal with their own knowledge. They are proud of doing it their way and the competition is now much more geographical spread than 20-30 years ago. Nice to look back in history to get a little perspective once in a while.

Even though the massive amount of information it is even harder to know about a subject because more people publish information about it.

"The Value of information goes down while the value of non-information goes up"

"Concentrate on the processes/products that can’t be done by an algorithm or the Chinese" " Don’t compete with machines or the Chinese - You will loose!"

"Watching television is poor investment - you will probably forget it again"

"Bachelors don’ know they have just acquired information"

"In lack of the word ‘Knowledge’ we would probably use the word ‘Meaning’."

"Statistics: 10-15 years to acquire knowledge within a subject."

"Learning is by doing."

Audience: " You only remember what you do yourself".

"Don’t get older - there’s nothing in it"

"Knowledge is social"

"The armies in europe is actually using a sort of Lean to build a better combat machine" 

"Benchmarking is bullshit"

"Reality and environmet change because the tools (e.g. IT) change"

"Competitive advantage of knowledge: Scan globally - adapt locally"

Had to get some initial information about Oracle Portal Products. In fact they have several portal products after they bought BEA. Some of them have a turbulent history as e.g. Plumtree, that was first bought by BEA and now is a part of the Oracle product portfolio.

We all have a huge respect for Oracle DB products (even though they are expensive), but reading this thread would you buy a Portal of this company?

Perhaps if you are in the IT department of a huge worldwide company that have strategic partnership with Oracle? Perhaps. I personally be cautious about committing  to a CMS / Portal product where even the expensive specialists and consultants  can’t solve problems with the product. The product is apparently too poor documented, or just too complicated to have a place in the software market.

We know that you have the resources and expertise, Oracle - show us the products.

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.

I know that you have more than a hand full of products, but …

Composite has just presented a brand new CMS, that looks promising in respect to simplicity and user friendliness.

Just to round up (some of the) the usability definitions:

Effectiveness, which is the accuracy and completeness with which users achieve certain goals. Indicators of effectiveness include quality of solution and error rates. In this study, we use quality of solution as the primary indicator of effectiveness, i.e. a measure of the outcome of the user’s interaction with the system. [Frøkjær 2000]

Efficiency, which is the relation between (1) the accuracy and completeness with which users achieve certain goals and (2) the resources expended in achieving them. Indicators of efficiency include task completion time and learning time. In this study we use task completion time as the primary indicator of efficiency. [Frøkjær 2000]

Satisfaction, which is the users’ comfort with and positive attitudes towards the use of the system. User satisfaction can be measured by attitude rating scales such as SUMI. In this study, we use preference as the primary indicator of satisfaction. [Frøkjær 2000]

Composite has with their brand new C1 focused on efficiency! This means that as few user resources as possible have to be used to achieve a specific goal. This is of course difficult to measure as every vendor have a specific function domain that they focus on, and what one vendor thinks is important might be judged less important by another. Again: Usability has to be balanced with a lot of other factors (GUI extensibility, GUI Model simplicity, etc.)

User interface: Good first impression

The first impression is good. C1 has a simple graphical user interface (GUI) which instantly reminded me of the first versions of CMS GUI. This is positive in the sense that novice users will not be terrified by a complicated GUI.

The efficiancy of the UI has not been tested yet.

“One Layer UI”

Composite has tried to create what they call a “One layer User interface”. This means several things:

• You don’t have to bother about which layer you are in - “There can only be one”!
• You can switch directly to other areas by a single click
• You can switch between different areas (e.g security and ordinary content) without loosing data (thanks to the extended use of Windows Work-flow Foundations)

In my opinion it is positive that Composite has tried to minimize the mental model of the user interface.

Back to the page-based model

Page-based model versus item-based model in short:

The item-based model use items in the back-end (the CMS) that will make up a single page in the front-end or will make up the appearance of data in the front-end. The page-based model usually have an one-to-one relation between back-end and front-end: An item in the back-end correspond to a page in the front-end. The main weakness of the item based GUI has been the difficulty of understanding the relation between data-items in the back-end and pages in the front-end. The main weakness of the page-based model has been that content is more than just a text field to be delivered to a page. Content usually has more structure and content has to be reused on several pages. This is a challenge in the page-based model.

Composite has done what in the CMS business is considered “bad” in the CMS phere. They have chosen the UI model to be page-based and have developed a simple way to include other data;

Simple and effective!

Architecture

One of the technical focuses has been to deliver an architecture to support a new level of segmentation between the data layer and the application layer. This has been done with Microsoft LINQ technology in Microsoft.net 3.5 (check out some videos about LINQ here).

As mentioned Composite has definately taken advantage of Windows Work-flow Foundations (nice!) and has made integration of data from other data sources very easy. This is a continuation of their former strategy on delivering a good tool for the webmasters .

Even though I didn’t get the chance to see the arhitecture in details and the C1 platform has not yet been tested, it seems that the development lab has done som serious planning to deliver a flexible technical platform for the customers. We’ll test it in the “BNP CMS and Portal Benchmark 2008″ (just launched).

Hosting and support

Composite won the prestigious CMS AWARD 2007 in the partner support category. With C1 they have expanded their ambitions to being the best in this area. Composite has signed up with a couple of hosting Partners that will take care of the hosting of C1. This means that the customers and partners will not have to worry about contacting a hosting partner.

Product strategy

Composite has a very idealistic strategy. They will not compromise the quality of the product and until now C1 CMS seems to be a very good choice for a lot of customers and advertising agencies that need a CMS but do not have the hardcore developers on the pay roll.

Composite has focused the product on this specific target group’s wishes and requirements. This also means that Composite has given lower priority to functionalities that are important to for example global companies. In the current version the CMS has no support for localization and language versions of pages/content items. As I see the user interface this will not be a problem to incorporate, but definately it will make it a bit more complex.

What I consider important is that Composite has the courage to focus on the needs of a narrow target group and try to make an excellent product for this group and let the product grow with the customer’s needs. Far too many vendors focus on a broad customer audience and often their product fail in head to head comparisons with more specialized products.

Some downsides initially (from a personal view)

I dislike when an Internet Software/Service removes the toolbar in my browser. In my opinion C1 can benchmark great on Efficiency but it affects my overall satisfaction on working with the CMS when having to open a new window when I need to go to another URL.

I have worked with CMS more than ten years now and I can’t remember that I have ever before lost the option for text editing content online. I would rather prefer that Composite had implemented the Word-press auto-save solution;

combined with the standard solution

to avoid loosing content when editing.

Have often thought of a situation where localized time based publishing really mattered.

Today I got a good example from one of my colleges  where localization would be important if publishing had to be done automatically in a global campaign.

Was playing an online arcade game with my nephew, the good old "Frogger" that is available at several web sites for free (good one at  Triplets ). And I realized this is a good description of how we are all maneuvering  in the CMS market - and in the IT-market in general.

What I think is important to notice is that often the web department do not have the resources to just walk across the road. They have to jump left and right to get the applications to fit together, get free of the doubtfulness solution partners and land the solution at the right budget and in right time. Often it is a hard task with lots of shortcuts and rapid decision paths.

All in all I think the web departments are doing a great job - definitely they are doing better than the "e-business departments" that often just walk in a straight line regardless  of the knowledge of the pitfalls. 

No wonder that the customers are confused about what  actually is included in the Open Source business Models.

Crown Peaks Rob Rose at the "Web Content 2007" said …

"Open Source: Free to buy, Cost to customize, cost to support, and cost to  implement upgrades."

(see http://www.slideshare.net/webcontent2007/….)

In my opinion that is definitely not true. Lots of open source software and CMS modules are not free and some open source CMS are not free as well. Open source means that the source code is available. It’s true that often the software can be free, but it is not a rule.

Over time I have evaluated the major open source Portals and CMS, both as a consultant and as an analyst. I would say that I have a good overview in the product market. Opening the local newspaper gave me a flash back to the typical Open Source products that flourished then.

Actually a lot of the portals in the market still suffering from strange looks. Even if they follow usability guidelines, they look and feel unfamiliar. On the opposite open source CMS vendors have in fact tried to adapt to the new realities of Microsoft dominating the office tools of the desktop PC (and thereby defining the look and feel standards).

Nonetheless one can in fact get inspired by alternatively solutions!

Years back some of the CMS Vendors (and their partners) aggressively explored the market of CMS as Application Service Provider (ASP). In Europe it was not that big a success. The larger companies  and organizations demanded a dedicated solution on their own hardware. Smaller companies and organizations rather preferred to buy a less pricey product and skip the worries of the monthly service bills.

Off course some of the decisions of the the companies that resisted the hosted software solutions wasn’t based on rational thinking.  Myths busted:

• You’re more independent on a dedicated solution than as a service
• The integration is impossible in the hosted solution
• The security is not as high as in a hosted solution.

Google has definitely changed a lot of the prejudices in the Software as Service Market. Probably because none of the big companies has yet felt the lock-in that exists in this software setup as well.  My guess is that when the first case of lock-in arrives the Software as Service concept will be on trial - how unfair it may be!

The different between how Google handle Software-as-service and the traditional Software (CMS) vendors is that Google in fact has developed the infrastructure to support Software-as-service - CMS Vendors for the most has not! My Guess is that we will start to see these new infrastructures of CMS vendors as well. Perhaps within the new upcoming CMS’s

As I see the market the following factors will determine the faith of Software-as-service CMS in the next years:

• Google still being able to prove the concept of Software-as-Service provider
• The Wordpress company to deliver further proof of the Software-as-service concept
• Smaller customers embracing the new web 2.0 technologies to discover that they actually will do with simpler tools to create and maintain content
• More visible cases to proof that "Content is King". CMS will eventually focus on content instead of using resources on graphics and design
• Better use of design Best Practices in the future in opposition to  customized graphics and design that often is worse than bad and often do not meet the main objectives off the web site.

For now it is still difficult for the vendors to sell CMS as Software-as-Service, but I predict a steep rise of the the market within the next 2-3 years ….call me then if I was wrong

Leave your opinions or views on how you see the future of CMS-as-Service in the CMS market.