Formerly CMS Watch. Here's our story
What Real Independence means. Find Out
Adriaan Bloem
18-Mar-2009
Tags: , Component Content Management, Digital and Media Asset Management, Document Management (ECM), E-mail Archiving and Management, Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Enterprise Search, Evaluating SharePoint, Portals and Content Integration, Web Analytics, Web Content Management, Industry Standards, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, , FAST and Search 2010, Hippo CMS, Magnolia CMS, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2010 WCM, Tridion 2011
Spring is here, and, as in Autumn, this means new products released and new version numbers. But how major or minor will the releases really be? Can you tell from the versioning alone?
Perhaps Microsoft is the most famous example of moving away from actual versioning for marketing purposes. After Windows 3.11, we got Windows 95, Windows 2000, then suddenly trademarked lettering in ME and XP, then Vista, and now we're back to Windows 7. The concurrently running naming schemes of other releases doesn't help finding out which is supposed to go with which, either: can SharePoint 2007 run on Windows Server 2003 or 2008? And will we get SharePoint 14 together with Office 14? Will that, in turn, cause FAST ESP to jump from 5.3 to 14, as well?
I was reminded of this by a tweet from @cmswire: "Does anyone else find a 'Completely refactored core' a bit strange for the point release of a CMS?" -- which referred to the 1.5 version of Digitalus CMS. Well, actually, no, that's not really strange: a .5 is often used when a significant component of software is updated, but not all of it, say, 50% (in a CMS, either only the core, or the interface, for example). So they were just being honest.
You would expect a significant increment in version to reflect an equally significant overhaul in the software.But of course, version numbers have often more to do with marketing than anything else. The practice is widespread, and just as an example (not to pick on any particular vendors), Magnolia's version 4 mostly consists of the added "Standard Templating Kit" (which their PR people picked up and ran with as "Supersonic Templating!"). Tridion is apparently debating whether their next release (expected for late May) should be called boring old 5.4 or brand new SDL Tridion 2009. (Maybe they should take Microsoft's example and preemptively move to version 2010 already -- though that's more of a car industry habit than a software ploy. Disclosure: CMS Watch does it too...).
Inflation in versioning has, in fact, become so common now that I have to explicitly tell people that Hippo CMS 7 is actually a completely different system than version 6. There's a lot more to that update than just new headlights and grille.
You may not need to wait for that next big release before implementing the software; and equally, you may find that minor upgrade to be a major hassle. At any rate, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Remember the semantic web? It was the big promise for the future, in oh, say, y2k. Now it's touted as Web 3.0. Apparently it's fine to overtake on the right (note that, outside of the UK and the US, this is not considered best practice).
So don't get hung up on version numbers. In the end, you'll want to get the real story. I hope we can help you.
Get the Real Story bi-weekly.
USA & Canada
+1 800 325 6190
UK
+44 (0) 20 3318 1911
International
+1 617 340 6464
All Other Inquiries
"The clear definitions of business services, customer tiers and the rating system allows business analysts, knowledge workers and the CIO to gain a much more rounded insight into SharePoint across the enterprise."
Paul Culmsee, IT Consultant, Clever Workarounds
Copyright Real Story Group 2001 - 2012. All rights reserved.
All analyst firms claim to be independent or vendor-neutral. We're different.
Get the real story on commercial and open source tools from a firm that works only for you, the technology customer.
Thank you for signing up for The Real Story Group Newsletter. You will receive our monthly newsletter, plus updates with new information on the technology streams you have expressed interest in below.