Executive

Those of you who have been in the content management industry a while will remember the CMS Watch report. I’m not sure when I first heard of it, but I think it was at an AIIM conference in 2005. I remember thinking that if we could just get Agility into that report, we would have it made. Looking back, it’s amazing to see how many of the systems that ranked well in 2005 are either gone or no longer relevant.

A few years later, I saw an article on CMS Wire that Ektron had made it into the Gartner Magic Quadrant. I realized that it was going to be hard to complete with this level of recognition, no matter how superior Agility is.

I've been pitching one of Canada’s largest and most interesting brands for about 5 years now. It’s one of those dream customers that every CEO has. They are the perfect fit for our unique mix of capabilities and I was fully convinced that with a little patience, we would be given the chance to prove it to them. My systematic, persistent relationship building and follow-ups finally paid off early this year when a they emailed me an RFP for a new CMS.

I became giddy as I read through it as it basically described the features of Agility in minute detail.

Editor's Note: Petr Palas, founder and CEO of Kentico software, lets his voice be heard to in this week's CEO Corner. In this article, he provides rebuttal to an earlier CEO Corner written by Agility's Michael Assad. Where Assad favors a "best of breed" approach and questions the validity of CXM, Palas believe the future is in fully integrated CXM solutions. Which CEO is right? We'll let you decide...

If I learned anything from my open source vs. proprietary CMS post, comparing CMS’s based on the method used to code them is no longer that relevant. Following the great discussion that was triggered convinced me that comparing along this dimension no longer contributes much to the CMS selection process.

The other thing I learned was that being cheeky, while good for attention, probably isn’t the most forthcoming way to educate the readers of this great publication. So this time around, I promise to be more thorough and objective!  Hopefully we’ll get some insights from the community again as well!

The first thing I did when I sat down to write this article was search the Google Keyword Tools for ‘Proprietary vs. Open Source CMS’. I wanted to see what kind of traffic this article might get. I got 0 searches per month globally.  A flip of the terms to the title I chose nets a whopping 22.  With < 10 in the United States.

My curiosity was piqued, so I checked ‘Open Source CMS’ and ‘Proprietary CMS’ and was not surprised with the 9,900 global searches for the former to 91 for the latter. This is out of 450,000 searches globally for ‘CMS’.

What I am surprised about is that more people aren’t looking for information comparing these two very different approaches to CMS.

All this talk about CXM being DOA has got me thinking about the age old question when it comes to CMS – or software in general for that matter.  Should you try to build the world into your software, or focus on specific capabilities and integrate for the rest?

It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of what the content management industry is calling 'Customer Experience Management', or CXM.  To be clear, I firmly believe that it's important to manage your customer experience.  What I don't believe is that your content management system vendor has the answer.

Yesterday, Robert Rose from Digital Clarity Group posted a great article on CXM. However, I came to very different conclusions based on the facts he described.

I went out for lunch with one of our customers last week. They are one of the largest magazine publishers in Canada and one of the first customers of our Magazine Suite.

I’ll leave real names out of it, but for the purposes of the article, I’ll call my lunch guest Ben. 

Ben is a media entrepreneur. He started a blog that became one of the most popular in Canada which was then bought by said publisher. He is now a VP.

"IT today is supporting more business processes than backend processes.  Today, IT has earned a stake at the table, has gone away from the bits and bytes, and is, more than ever, a partner to the business."

-Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture Ltd., "What's Next for IT?", The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2007.

When open source projects becomes more popular the project leaders often need to increase the time spent on their projects. The increasingly popular Windows-based content management system (CMS), mojoPortal, is no exception to this rule. mojoPortal's project leader, Joe Audette, recently announced on his blog that he is currently making career changes show he can better nurture the mojoPortal project along: