Jon Marks, a technical analyst from the United Kingdom, posted an interesting article last week on his blog. In the post, The CMS Word on the Tweet, he discusses the difficulty of finding "his world" on Twitter when seeking conversations centered around content management system. Jon even uses CMSReport.com's CMS Focus as an example for showing what he observes as a large divide between open source Web content management systems and propriety enterprise software. A divide that many of us may already recognize but haven't quite put into words like Jon has.
To the Big Wide World (which includes Twitter, and all the sites I’ve mentioned above), CMS means “Free Open Source CMS with Low Cost of Ownership”. The commercial Open Source CMS solutions don’t make the cut either. Four of the five Open Source CMS products reviewed by CMS Watch (Drupal, Joomla!, Plone CMS and TYPO3) live in both worlds. Open CMS doesn’t as my feeling is it is a bit too complex. Alfresco, DotNetNuke and ez Publish made one of the lists above, but don’t really feature in the Tweetosphere.
I inhabit a world populated by analysts, commercial vendors, systems integrators, large agencies and other such creatures. I don’t believe we pay much attention to the other world until a product jumps the gap. And it seems difficult for a product that isn’t Java or Microsoft based to make it in to My World.
Jon asked me via Twitter to let him know what I thought of his article. I think Jon has done an excellent job of identifying the dichotomy found within CMS. It does seem that the enterprise often takes an approach to content management that differs greatly from open source projects. The approaches differ so much that the parties involved often end up defining what is a CMS in two different ways. The only thing I would like to comment on is that I unfortunately live on a third, yet unidentified, world that the other two worlds don't fully understand.
