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Jarrod Gingras

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Call me a Grinch, but Web CMS is not dead

30-Nov-2010

Tags: Web Content and Experience Management, Selecting Technology

At the risk of being labeled a Grinch during this holiday season, I feel the need to inject a dose of reality into a conversation that I see gathering steam.

It's very easy to get caught up in the hype....

"Web CMS is dead."

"Websites as we’ve known them are no longer relevant - all visitors want to engage with you."

"You must have social elements on your site."

"All companies are looking for tools to learn from their website visitors."

"Web content should be coming from several integrated systems, not one Web CMS."

Now don't get me wrong – I think these are all worthy goals and some organizations are doing these things successfully.  However, in the real world most organizations are simply grappling with the more basic problem of gaining some control of their content, and empowering their employees to manage this content in responsible ways.

Over the last year, I've helped numerous research customers select new content technologies and as a rule, I begin each interaction by asking the project stakeholders, what their criteria is for success. It may be alarming to hear, but answers are almost invariably along the lines of:

"I just want Mary in the Marketing department to be able to make a change on the pages she owns without having to call us."

"I just want to be able to edit the home page without doing any HTML coding."

"I want to be able to know which content I can archive or delete."

"I need an audit trail of who modified each piece of content."

"I want to be able to cut and paste from Word and not get crappy code inserted on my pages."

Webmasters still exist and they are plentiful. WYSIWYG editors are still really important (and frustrating!). Companies typically rely heavily on the person (or two) who knows some HTML.

Just like anyone else I find  it is easy to get caught up in the sexy demos from Ektron, SDL Tridion, CoreMedia, or other Web CMS vendors, but as an analyst and advisor I can't lose sight of the fact that many buyers are not ready to do anything more than the basics. The fact is, they may never be ready, as many are simply looking for the fundamental tools that allow them to execute on core business functions.  And very often, basic is far from simple.

To paraphrase... "Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. Does a CMS need all this stuff? What if good a CMS, perhaps, just a little means enough."