Author: Tony White (Page 1 of 3)

On Wednesday, May 6, 2009, at 1:00 p.m. (Eastern), the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp. (NOTMC), the Gilbane Group, and ISITE Design will host an online repeat of one of the most popular sessions from the 2008 Gilbane Conference in Boston. Join us to hear Nathan Williams, NOTMC’s Interactive Director, talk about their exhaustive search for the right WCM solution and the extensive user experience planning they undertook in the process. I (Tony White) will describe the process the Gilbane Group used to help NOTMC evaluate WCM products, and ISITE Design will highlight key ways in which they helped NOTMC plan a successful information architecture.

To register for this online event, click here.

On May 19, I will be giving a keynote address on the Web Content Management market landscape at the CMS2009 Conference in Nijmegen, Holland (http://www.cmscongres.nl/).  In the presentation, I will discuss recent trends in client demands for WCM products as well as strategic directions that vendors will take over the next year.  On May 20, I will also lead an interactive two-hour workshop on estimating the total cost of ownership of WCM products over a five-year period (see “Workshop Tony White” in the sidebar of http://www.cmscongres.nl/).  And for you English speakers, don’t worry about the language.  Even though the CMS2009 website is in Dutch, the presentations will be in English.

For those of you attending the AIIM Conference in Philadelphia next week, I will be giving the following presentation on Tuesday, March 31, at 2:30 p.m.  Hope to see you there.

Session: WCM10: How to Choose WCM Solutions and Estimate Total Cost of Ownership Over Five Years

Date: Tuesday, March 31
Time: 2:30 PM – 3:20 PM
Room: 113C

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.

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.”