June 2008 Archives
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.
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.
