Recently by Elizabeth Gooding

In my last post I said that composition vendors weren't very far along with their content partnerships. Nasser Barghouti, the Chief Technology Officer at Document Sciences set the record straight before I could finish my Thanksgiving turkey. Mr. Barghouti informed me that Document Sciences has had a long and successful integration partnership with both Filenet and Documentum. In fact, the next major release of the Xpression Product Suite, will offer an embedded OEM version of Documentum. Document Sciences wants to be able to give customers the choice of a bundled solution or open integration. I expect to see a lot more partnerships of this type and more CM OEM deals with leading composition players.

On August 15, 2006 another Gilbane blogger, Rita Warren, queried whether a marriage between CMS and CRM made sense. “Circa 1996… it was all about one-to-one customer communications. That (broad) vision was apparently too hard to realize back then! Maybe it's possible now.”
Well, circa 2006 it’s still all about one-to-one, but I think we understand what that means a lot better. One-to-one customer communications are not only possible, but they are happening in many small and large businesses. In most cases they are not coming from major CRM implementations ala Siebel – they are coming from composition tools. Many composition tool vendors now refer to themselves as personalization or customer communications management products. If you look at some of the case studies from the composition vendors included in my last entry you will find case studies for communications such as statements, enrollment books, and invoices that tailor messaging, educational content, product content, document format and delivery channel based on customer data or stated preferences.

Okay – so as a CMS professional why should you care about composition tools? Several reasons:

• Personalization is a beast that feeds on content. Lots and lots of content. Many composition experts have never even heard of taxonomy – CMS architects needed!
• Many composition tools have rudimentary content capabilities – but integration with “real” content management tools is necessary to feed the beast – CMS integrators needed!
• High volume composition tools are getting to the point where they can serve printed and electronic transactional channels equally well and are starting to move upstream into driving personalized web content. CMS and composition tools are not on the same path – visionaries needed!

It’s only a matter of time before some of the composition vendors decide that they should be in the CMS business. Personally, I think that trying to tightly couple those capabilities with composition would be a bad idea. Composition tools are complicated enough as it is. CMS vendors who have been trying to deliver the holy grail of print and web content management across document types are still not there yet. I find it hard to believe that a composition solution would leapfrog over the current CMS vendors. I suppose this is one instance where it would be nice to be proved wrong.

Meanwhile, an easier path to integrating current CMS technology for managing web and print content with leading high-volume composition tools would be welcome. Document Sciences has worked with Documentum and a few others. GMC Software has partnered with Interwoven a couple of times and Exstream and Metavante have both partnered with IBM OnDemand. I have also seen a number of Exstream - Vignette combos. Few vendors have broad and established content management partnerships and the market is ripe for this kind of collaboration.

I’m a firm believer in the value of user groups. I think that they are most valuable when the user community has enough energy to manage them independently from the software publisher. This is rare and getting rarer in the composition software industry.

In the absence of an independent user group, and not to be confused with same, many vendors sponsor User Conferences, which are great opportunities to mingle with other users and see presentations on “real life product implementations” albeit under the watchful eye of the vendor.

A number of vendors have their 2006 user conferences coming up in the Autumn:

Your definition of "document composition" will largely depend on your perspective.

A graphic designer might immediately think of Quark Express or Adobe InDesign. A desktop publisher could probably name various plug-ins to those environments or perhaps list database-publishing tools like Corel Ventura or Adobe PageMaker. If you are approaching this question from an operations, IT or print production perspective you have a much longer and more granular continuum of needs which can only be met with high volume composition software. In my work, I deal with both ends of the continuum from the graphic designer to the high-volume output specialist (see www.ArtPlusTechnology.com)