Recently in Web Content Management - WCM Category

The main conference program will be published in a week or two, but the 1/2 day pre-conference workshop descriptions for June 2nd have been posted at: http://gilbanesf.com/workshops.html.

How to Select a Web Content Management System
Instructor: Seth Gottlieb, Principal, Content Here

Making SharePoint Work in the Enterprise
Instructor: Shawn Shell, Principal, Consejo, Inc.

Managing the Web: The Fundamentals of Web Operations Management
Instructor: Lisa Welchman, Founding Partner, Welchman Pierpoint

Getting Started with Business Taxonomy Design
Instructors: Joseph A. Busch, Founder and Principal, & Ron Daniel, Principal, Taxonomy Strategies LLC

Sailing the Open Seas of New Media
Instructor: Chris Brogan, President, New Marketing Labs, LLC

We have always had some kind of an executive panel where senior managers from content management vendors are questioned on their views of what is happening technology and trend-wise. This is not so much a "face-off" as it is an interactive discussion aimed at providing the audience a chance to hear the different world views of competing suppliers. Understanding the visions behind the marketing, product development, and partnership activity of vendors is at least as important as comparing a feature list and watching demos. Of course, you'll want to see the demos of these and all the other vendors at Gilbane Boston as well.

WCM-3: Web Content "Management State of the Industry"
Thursday December 4th 11:00am, Westin Copley, Boston

This distinguished panel of technology and market experts will discuss their perspectives on the three or four most important concerns of business managers and IT professionals in planning for and executing WCM initiatives over the next year. The panelists are chosen based on their depth of knowledge within WCM and their ability to identify, analyze, and articulate what the current key concerns are for WCM customers. This interactive discussion will help attendees to identify and address potential liabilities in their own WCM strategies as well as to understand what leading practitioners and technology suppliers envision in their own project/product roadmaps.

Moderator: Tony White, Lead Analyst, WCM, Gilbane Group
Speakers:
* Erik Aeyelts Averink, President, SDL Tridion
* John Girard, CEO, Clickability
* Ben Kiker, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Interwoven
* John Newton, CTO & Chairman, Alfresco
* Dmitri Tcherevik, CTO, Fatwire

We came across a study entitled "The 2008 Tribalization of Business" while preparing to publish a new Gilbane white paper on web experience management. The "Tribalization" research looks at communities and online marketing: how they deliver value, obstacles to making them work, what contributes to success, and how marketers measure effectiveness. Highlights of the research (co-sponsored by Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research) are reported on marketingcharts.com.

This datapoint caught our eye:

"The greatest obstacles to making a community work are not related to technology or funding, the study found; rather, getting people [to engage] in the community (51%)."

Community is one of four components of engagement strategy discussed in the new Gilbane white paper (the others are personalization, user-generated content, and collaboration). In the paper, we provide some guidance about making communities work not just at start-up but throughout their lifecycle.

Engage Me! Web Experience Management as the New Business Imperative is the companion white paper to a webinar in which we participated with Linksys and the Colorado Department of Transportion. The webinar and paper are sponsored by FatWire. An archive of the webinar is available for viewing, and the paper is now available for download on the FatWire site. It will be posted on the Gilbane site later this month.

Well, actually the report was published by the author, Seth Gottlieb, a few months ago, but it is now available at the Gilbane store. Seth has worked with open source content management systems for years and for this report personally installed all the products he evaluated. Seth has written a really excellent report that is a must-read for anyone considering investing in and open source web content management system, or for anyone inclined to dismiss them out of hand.

Report Description
Open Source Web Content Management in Java provides an in depth analysis of seven of the leading open source Java web content management platforms. Written for technical decision makers, the report breaks down the open source marketplace and describes various categories of open source software and where they are most effectively used. The report also provides a framework for understanding the cost and risk implications of selecting an open source platform over commercial software.

Each 15+ page product evaluation explains the technical architecture and functional capabilities of the platform and provides insight into how the project is organized and the community behind it. There is enough technical detail to provide a foundation for ruling out incompatible technologies and prototyping the likely candidates. There is also useful information for content contributors and site managers to help them understand how the tool would support their responsibilities of today and their vision for tomorrow.

Products Evaluated:

• Alfresco Enterprise
• Apache Lenya
• Daisy CMS
• Hippo CMS
• Jahia Enterprise
• Magnolia Enterprise
• OpenCms

Buy Open Source Web Content Management in Java, by Seth Gottlieb.
NOTE: This is a downloadable PDF file. Acrobat version 6 or higher required.

Join the Gilbane Group and Vignette on July 30, 2008, at 2:00 p.m. (Eastern) for a webinar entitled “The Keys to a Targeted Online Experience.” The primary topic will be the synergies derived from the tight integration of Web Content Management-Portal-Collaboration suites versus stand-alone applications.

Click here to register.

An attendee at an industry conference recently asked me, “Who are Vignette’s products really best suited for?” While the full answer to this broad question would require a consulting engagement to deliver, the short version is “medium-sized and large enterprises that have needs for a unified WCM, collaboration, and portal solution.” While each of these Vignette applications is fully functional on its own, the real value proposition of Vignette’s products stems from the synergies of tightly integrating all three modules. In support of this statement, one client several months ago bluntly stated that for the kind of static Web publishing it had in mind, the Vignette Content Management product was “too complicated and too expensive.” I agreed. But for larger enterprises with collaborative intranets, extranets, or public-facing internet sites - especially those with demanding requirements for dynamic content and personalization - less sophisticated Web publishing solutions would certainly fail, regardless of price.

In a recent consulting project, the Gilbane Group had the opportunity to get a hands-on look at the current version of the Clickability Platform. Several marketing-oriented product enhancements over the past year will be of particular interest to our clients. While the product maintains its strengths in traditional online publishing (due in part to its origins in the publishing industry), there have been major improvements in areas such as analytics and reporting, social computing, and user interface design. In fact, Clickability has re-oriented its Platform to align specifically with the usage and campaign requirements of non-technical online marketing managers. Although product features such as in-context editing, workflow, library services, and user management, remain important and robust parts of the product, the new social computing functionality for online visitor collaboration have done much to bring Clickability to the forefront of Web 2.0-oriented content management offerings. This functionality includes out-of-the-box support for visitor loyalty profiles, discussion boards, visitor ratings, blogs, wikis, and podcasts.

Combining these new social computing components with improvements to Clickability’s analytics and reporting capabilities makes the product a natural fit for companies looking for a Web content platform to support online marketing initiatives. Areas of improvement within analytics and reporting include visitor analysis, profile targeting and reporting, campaign management, A/B split testing, reporting dashboards, ad weighting, and embedded in-context statistics. While organizations looking for a Web content management application to support traditional online publishing can still successfully use the product, they may find the marketing-orientation of the product unnecessary or awkward. And because good analytics and reporting in the service of online campaign management delivers high value for online retailers (in the form of higher average sales prices and better conversation rates among online shoppers), the product may demand a higher price than those publishing static HTML sites can justify. But for at least one of Clickability’s target audiences - online retail marketing managers - the new version of this platform warrants careful, hands-on consideration.

Mary Laplante will be moderating a webinar at noon eastern time today, Web Experience Management: Essentials for Engaging Customers and Winning Loyalty. The sponsor is Fatwire, and the speakers will be Yogesh Gupta, President and CEO of FatWire; Sovan Shatpathy, Manager of Web Infrastructure at Linksys; and Erik Kulvinskas, Web Coordinator for the Colorado Department of Transportation. We are seeing a lot of activity in Web Experience Management, and Mary offers the following definition:

Web experience management is a business practice that formalizes an organization's approach to relating to its audiences through web-based channels. WEM is based on the premise that engagement that delivers high value to all participants does not happen by accident, but rather, by design. Only when experience is deliberately managed does it become repeatable, predictable, and capable of being improved and optimized. WEM, as a business practice, is enabled by a range of technologies, including web content management, personalization, dynamic content delivery, analytics and optimization, and emerging tools for social computing. As such, WEM calls for integrated marketing and IT processes.

Registration for the webinar is still open.

Several clients have recently asked about Day Software and whether its Communiqué is still being actively developed. The answer is a resounding “yes.” In fact, the product remains one of the most technically sophisticated and flexible content management applications on the market. Because Day continues to be highly involved in Java development communities, information technology departments are usually its strongest supporters. Communiqué’s technical flexibility affords IT rich integration and product-extension capabilities and an overall standards-based architecture that often aligns well with services-oriented design methodologies.

Unfortunately for Day, its focus on the technical side of the product has been at the expense of simplicity and elegance in the user interface, producing at times a product too complex for non-technical business managers. To its credit, the vendor has recent made improvements in user interface design. Its longstanding reputation for UI complexity, however, still sometimes causes enterprises to eliminate Day from serious consideration.

Given Day’s past marketing foibles in the U.S. (including a near withdrawal in 2002-2003), there still lingers in the minds of prospective customers some question about the vendor’s commitment to the U.S. market. We feel comfortable saying that Day has demonstrated a strong commitment to this market over the past three to four years; and we see this trend continuing with its recent UI improvements, ongoing leadership in Java development, and a nascent but well-deserved increase in interest from enterprises trying to combine integrated multi-module solutions (Web content management, digital asset management, document management, portal, and collaboration) with technically strategic services-oriented architectures.

While many of our clients use analytics applications to support their WCM projects and e-commerce initiatives, other clients not yet using analytics often ask what value can be derived from doing so. The answer depends on the purpose of the client’s website.

For online commerce sites, analytics functionality can be invaluable in that it allows companies to track user behavior on the site and to correlate user behavior with conversion rates, average sales prices, and other useful sales metrics. The bottom line is that analytics almost always increase online revenues. Analytics can also be of great value to non e-commerce clients by enabling them to monitor content consumption rates and to gauge the relevance and effectiveness of content through the analysis of consumption patterns. This naturally makes analytics (sometimes built into “campaign management” modules) indispensable to marketing professionals interested either in optimizing content dissemination on information-based sites (“content portals”) or in maximizing profitability on retail sites.

Please join us on May 8, 2008, at 1:00 p.m. (Eastern), for a webinar sponsored by Bridgeline Software entitled: “Marketing Trends: Enabling Intelligent, Analytics-Driven Content.”