Byrne Tony Byrne

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RedDot's Purple Monkey and the ECM/WCM divide

26-Apr-2007

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Web Content and Experience Management, Marketplace at Large, , Web Site Management

Open Text's Web CMS subsidiary RedDot has just chosen Chicago-based interactive agency Purple Monkey Studios, Inc. as their "Partner of the Year." Purple Monkey can certainly boast a decent client list and the obligatory cool home page. To me, this news more than perhaps anything else exemplifies the gulf between enterprise content management (ECM) and web content management (WCM). Could you imagine Open Text (or any other large ECM vendor) citing a firm called Purple Monkey as their ECM partner of the year? More typically, they will laud more prosaic resellers -- like this IT firm that resells Open Text's e-mail management tools.

We'll argue til we're blue in the face that the management of enterprise documents versus the management of website pages beget very many similar challenges. But you the buyer should recognize the big differences between processing corporate files and overseeing an interactive web experience. And partly that difference is cultural. Does your WCM vendor truly grasp the depth of your required enterprise controls? Does your ECM vendor really understand the adaptive communications needs of your web publishing team? Today, closing that gap will mostly fall to you.

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