Byrne Tony Byrne

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Web Idol 2008

6-Nov-2008

Tags: Web Content Management, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, , eZ publish, FirstSpirit, Hippo CMS, Sitecore

Here at J. Boye 2008 in Denmark, yesterday we held the 3rd-annual Web Idol, where five vendors got seven minutes each to demo their wares and get critiqued by a set of judges (myself included). Ultimately, the audience voted the winner.

The general crowd consensus was that this set of demos were less interesting and polished than previous years. But I thought the choices vendors made about what to show were revealing. Sitecore, eZ publish, and SDL Tridion all demonstrated rather feature-rich (and daunting) "power-user" interfaces. We see this a lot in demos: vendors trying to appeal to the most sophisticated users in the room -- who presumably are decisive in the final selection. But do you want the most powerful system, or the easiest to use? Different stakeholders are going to have different answers.

All five vendors (including Hippo and e-Spirit) emphasized website management over basic content/information management. This follows an important trend in the industry, but still left some of the audience wondering a bit about how the workaday business contributor would simply edit a single page.

So who won the election? It was close, but no re-count necessary, with the Danish "home team" vendor, Sitecore winning the day.

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