"In a space currently dominated by proprietary technologies, managing the long-term preservation, provenance, and accessibility of digital content is often downplayed or ignored."
- Cheryl McKinnon, CMO of Nuxeo, From information overload to Dark Ages 2.0?, OpenSource.com, October 29, 2010.
What a great year 2010 was for content management. Open source CMS projects seemed to have grown up this year while proprietary systems appeared to continue in their evolution. While social publishing systems may not have conquered the traditional content management system, the CMS definitely took notice by integrating as many social media features developers could come up with.
Below are the top ten stories of 2010 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. The stories in this list were ranked by the number of views per month since the articles first appeared at CMS Report.
Top Ten Content Management Stories of 2010
As you can see, stories on Drupal, Joomla!, Sharepoint, SilverStripe, and MODx brought a lot of visitors to the site. Not all the stories listed above would have been one of the ten I would have personally picked, but I'll respect the numbers behind their ranking. I personally, don't like "versus" articles yet readers seemed to flock those articles. Unfortunately quality of writing doesn't appear to always matter as there were some very well written articles we posted in 2010 that didn't make this list.
The year 2011 will undoubtedly bring change and new stories to the world of content management systems. I think the year will also be a year of decision for the direction we take CMSReport.com. I feel as if this site of ours is stuck somewhere between our roots as a niche blog and a potentially popular CMS news site. I'm hoping we make some changes in the new year that all our readers can appreciate and value.
Let me start by clarifying a few things:
1) I work for a CMS vendor, for an enterprise CMS.
2) I am also a big fan of open source.
Yet, I am attempting to write this article with all bias aside; with all generalizations thrown out the window. Without feeling like I am trying to justify this article, I think it is also worth mentioning that the CMS vendor that I work for produces a product that I would avidly use even if I didn’t work for them.
Every vendor, whether they are enterprise or open source do research on their competition. Although the internal information that these vendors have are usually pretty good, there is not a lot of thorough comparisons readily available on the net. When I look on the web, all I see are generalizations. I want to get rid of this, drop biased opinions and give you the hard, honest truth. Sure, I can only talk from my experience, and I have not used every CMS under the sun, but I have had the pleasure (and sometimes pain) of using a diverse range; enough, I would say to be able to stoke the fires. To back this up if someone asked me:
I think it is important to first define what the two systems are in order to be able to thoroughly compare the two options.
From a high level perspective you could argue that both have advantages and disadvantages. It is only when you analyze the functionality of the two systems when the decision on what way to go is made that much easier.
If you listen to the marketing hype, Open Source and SaaS ECM seem almost too good to be true. The new kids on the block have been getting a lot of press lately as they scramble to find their niche. And on the surface, it looks like they’re starting to differentiate themselves from conventional ECM offerings with claims of low costs and quick installations, respectively. It’s hard to resist the dual temptations of cheap and fast ECM implementation.
But like my grandfather used to say, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” If you’re shopping around, you probably already know that a few of us conventional ECM vendors have been offering robust, affordable, easy-to-use solutions for decades. We’ve learned a few things over the years by working in the trenches and listening to our customers. One thing that we did not need to learn is that cheap and fast are recipes for disaster - or, at the very least, disappointment.
We have also cleaned up other vendors’ failed installations enough to know that a fast deployment doesn’t necessarily equate to a successful deployment. If you’re drinking the Kool-Aid and thinking that affordable, fast ECM implementations are only available from Open Source and SaaS vendors, you would be wise to investigate a little deeper. Because the fact is that Open Source and SaaS are rarely inexpensive. And the idea that quick implementations aren’t readily available from conventional ECM vendors is a fallacy. Why, then, does it typically take so long to deploy ECM?
Gartner says-correctly-that conventional ECM systems can take six to eighteen months to deploy on average. Can we do it more quickly? Of course. Is it something worth promoting? Not really. Why?
Successfully controlling all of your structured and unstructured documents - and then leveraging them to make your company more efficient and profitable - is the goal. Quick implementations seldom allow organizations to make significant improvements to their business processes. Furthermore, it’s important to keep in mind that no two clients - or implementations - are the same. Even within the same industry, businesses that might appear to be comparable would still prepare differently to start a project.
“The cloud might be a deal breaker for many software companies, either from a licensing standpoint or because their software is not extensible.”
We sat down with Emmanuel Garcin, Vice President & General Manager of Jahia Inc., in Washington, DC to discuss the open source CMS Cloud offering.
Hi Emmanuel, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. In a recent release Jahiastated it has experienced a growing acceptance for hosted web content management, even among conservative industries like banking and finance, for both corporate websites and Intranet projects. Why is not everyone using the cloud?
Emmanuel Garcin: Some companies still have financial incentives to own their datacenter It really depends on the financial structure of the firm. Some prefer hardware that you can depreciate, in order to maximize tax deductions [CAPEX versus OPEX]. Most of our Cloud clients prefer to expense [OPEX] their web initiative spendings.
When discussing the cloud option with new or existing clients, what kind of concerns do you hear the most?
Emmanuel Garcin: Different types of customers have different reasons for looking at our cloud offerings. SMBs with low IT resources don’t want to spend on infrastructure. Large enterprises with datacenters still want the flexibility of the cloud, for example, to reach a new region. Thanks to Amazon, we have computing power all over the world. Companies also may want to get faster to market and bypass the internal IT/datacenter processes which can be heavy and time consuming.
However, both types of customers hesitate to trust others to administer and secure their systems because they want to be able to monitor and back up the cloud themselves. Their concern is always the same: What do we do when it’s down? Salesforce.com had the same hesitation in the early adoption phase. In our experience, Jahias’s automatic monitoring, security and backup option is often the selling argument.
