Biggest changes have come around acquisitions (e.g., HP), and a fast-moving Red Line (a.k.a., Collaboration & Social), as well as a number of key entrants in the Digital & Media Asset Management segment.

For higher-resolution JPG and nicely-printable PDF versions of the map, visit
http://www.realstorygroup.com/vendormap/

Hope you find it helpful!

But now Jive has IPO'ed, and customers have reasonable expectations about understanding where the company will go after transitioning beyond it's venture-fueled youth. Financial analysts seem to expect more of same regarding the company's stock price, but if you know us, then you know that we don't focus on that. What matters is vendor "fit" for you the software buyer.

And in that regard I think Jive's biggest challenges going forward will prove institutional. Jive's a "tweener" vendor: no longer small and agile, but lacking the huge resources to execute globally in way that, say, an IBM can. Moreover, Jive's offerings are divided among significantly different use-cases (external communities and internal collaboration), and delivery models (hosted and on-premise). Doubtless this diversifies revenue streams in  ways that appeal to equity markets, but is this strategy best for customers? I have my doubts. It's very hard to reconcile the inevitable codebase forks.

Meantime, customers have hinted to us that they wish Jive would invest more in refactoring the underlying platform itself. Jive's core, Java-based platform is rich and therefore complicated -- and thus prone to some of same problems that the big players experience. Case in point: readers of our evaluation report know that many Jive customers remain stuck on previous versions because extensive customization can make upgrades unusually fraught.

Of course, refactoring a codebase while maintaining backwards compatibility with a large, diverse installed base is an unusually complex undertaking for any vendor. But now that Jive has grown up, customers should reasonably expect them to be able to pull it off. It's where the question gets called of finding sufficient resources while also scratching Wall Street's quarterly itch. We'll keep watching, on your behalf.

Our subscribers will see several new vendors under review as well as an overhauled set of evaluation criteria. More about those in the coming weeks.

For now I'd like to share one of the big themes of the report: customer disappointment with major platform vendors.

Why? It turns out that business units want....ready-made business applications, not the promise of a development platform. And while major platform vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) can check numerous functional boxes for collaboration and social networking, they don't provide many polished applications out-of-the-box.

Some commentators have suggested that the real answer here lies in broader ecosystems, and I believe there's some truth to that. But "ecosystem" for platform vendors today primarily means armies of systems integrators willing to write one-off extensions to the base code, at no small fee. This becomes yet another dimension to the disappointment customers are sharing with us.

I'm not suggesting that an all best-of-breed approach is nirvana. To quote my colleague Kashyap from our media release yesterday:

To be sure, a mixed vendor strategy presents near-term challenges for enterprise systems architectures, as well as long-term challenges for business users, who may later confront splintered profiles and disconnected activity streams.

The good news is that, in this maturing Enterprise 2.0 marketplace, you have a wide array of plausible choices.

Subscribers can find the latest updates here. To download a free sample, click here.

Not surprisingly, most architects have taken an intense interest in cloud-based computing, across both its public and private (and hybrid) incarnations. These same architects typically also participate in software selection decisions. Then here's what happens: architects immersed in planning cloud-based futures often get surprised to discover how poorly traditional software vendors fit into that world.

Among the unpleasant surprises that can emerge:

• Most off-the-shelf ("COTS") tools are not readily cloudable, or claim cloud-readiness but must be installed in a specific cloud environment (like Azure) and often cannot take advantage of some key cloud benefits, like elasticity and rapid provisioning of new instances
• Many SaaS-based offerings (increasingly favored by business units) do not actually employ cloud infrastructures -- not the end of the world, but requires probing the attendant consequences
• Some self-described "cloud-based" solutions are really just managed hosting services for traditional COTS packages -- in short, outsourcing your datacenter, and not much more (sometimes much less)

Architects looking to engage business stakeholders on the benefits of cloud need to understand that...

1. Non-technical people may have a very different idea about what "cloud" means
2. Vendors coming in to solve business problems may have similarly fuzzy (often conveniently fuzzy) notions

So it becomes all the more important for architects to remove any rose-colored glasses when looking at packaged software. There's a reason why software that's purpose-built for cloud deployments works better in that environment than toolsets struggling through a cloud retrofit. Let us know if we can help you sort it all out.

We're particularly interested in candidates based in northern Europe, UK, and North America. But for the right person who truly gets what we do (and how we do it) and thinks they can knock our socks off, well then, we're less interested in where you live.

Find more details here.

SharePoint licensees seeking to deliver on the promise of social networking and more advanced collaboration applications must therefore choose among three alternative approaches to close the gap:

1. Complement
2. Supplement
3. Extend

Each alternative carries specific benefits and demerits in terms of cost, time to market, long-term adaptability, mobile enablement, user experience, external access, and other dimensions. This recent briefing carefully examines the pros and cons to help you make the best decision.  It concludes with an analysis of a bonus fourth option -- do nothing and wait for SharePoint 2013 -- as well as a handy comparison chart to guide your decision-making.

It's available to our Collaboration and SharePoint research stream subscribers.  If you're not a subscriber, you can also purchase the briefing à la carte.

1) "Bring Your Own Device" policies will push HTML5 adoption for mobile access to enterprise applications
This has definitely happened, although HTML5 adoption remains quite incomplete.

2) Content-rich customers will rebel against Web CMS marketing spins
The key phrase here is "content-rich." We've definitely seen some disappointment among high-volume publishers (e.g., media), who don't want e-marketing and other corollary services from their WCM vendor.

3) Microsoft will turn to partners to fix SharePoint shortcomings
Yep. It's an old story. As a SharePoint version ages, Redmond stops arguing that it's feature-complete and encourages customers to seek out supplementary tools from partners.

4) The top end of the Web CMS market will be redefined
This happened. OpenText/Vignette and IBM continue to fade. EMC gave up on Documentum Web Publisher, Oracle is effectively deprecating its UCM (neé Stellent) WCM in favor of its new FatWire acquisition, and the future of Interwoven TeamSite/LiveSite has gotten even dicier with HP's acquisition of Autonomy. The big boys, long fading, have almost disappeared, getting replaced by a bevy of more focused alternatives.

5) Intranet community managers will adopt public social functionality
We've definitely seen more of this, though it's still not pervasive.

6) SaaS vendors will try to separate from "The Cloud"
Nope, we were wrong. If anything the opposite: SaaS vendors have uniformly embraced fluffy Cloud terminology to ride that wave of hype. This was the case even among those SaaS players that don't actually employ Cloud-based technology.

7) Buyers will have a greater acceptance of newer standards
In some cases (CMIS, HTML5) yes, but in other cases (activitystrea.ms, OpenSocial) not so much, yet.

8) Case Management will become the leading application from high-end ECM vendors
Absolutely. Case management actually constitutes a family of applications relevant to many different types of organizations. It's where much of the non-SharePoint ECM action lies today.

9) Digital Asset Management vendors will greatly expand video management capabilities
This happened, though perhaps not as heavily as we predicted. It remains unclear whether traditional DAM players have the chops to compete effectively with more video-oriented vendors.

10) E-mail will remain the world's de-facto enterprise document repository and workflow system
Alas, we were correct. Companies ditching e-mail remain very much the exception and not the rule.

11) Portal software will increasingly produce services for other portals
Hard to know exactly. Major enterprise software gets talked about more than implemented, but portals seem the opposite. Enterprises who have committed heavily to portal technology continue to invest in those platforms -- or perhaps more tellingly -- in the systems around those platforms. Yet more enterprises are getting comfortable with multiple portals, including "portal lite" applications.

12) Specialized talent around managing content will begin to migrate out of large corporations
This is an organic trend that's difficult to track, but we saw increasing evidence of it last year, as consultancies and integrators desperate for more talent continued to comb the ranks of enterprises for experienced specialists. There's no recession in information management technology right now...

By my count, we were about 9 out of 12, or 75%. Not bad, not awesome. About the same rate as previous years -- and a reasonable co-efficient to add to our 2012 predictions. Look for those new predictions from us in the next few days....

• CrownPeak
• e-Spirit
• HP/Autonomy (Interwoven)
• IBM Web Content Manager
• Limelight Networks (formerly Clickability)
• OmniUpdate
• Plone
• TerminalFour
• TYPO3

What can you glean from this collection of updates? The marketplace remains vibrant, with big players and small, commercial and open source, on-premise and SaaS offerings -- all trying to innovate, albeit with varying degrees of success...

As always, our WCM evaluation stream subscribers can download the updated chapters and comparison charts immediately. If you've never seen our reviews before, you download a free sample here.

OK, this is partly an argument about labels, but labels matter. What most employees understand as their "intranet" -- updates from corporate communications, some HR forms, and a mountain of outdated docs -- is increasingly irrelevant.

The issue here is not that traditional intranet services have somehow lost value. Rather, it's that business units are moving on. They don't want to be "lured" to your vision of an intranet. They want some fairly specific services. From what I can see, there is a confluence of factors here:

Applications over platforms
Platforms are good for the kind of long-term planning and prep where IT excels. Unfortunately, platforms are less amenable to delivering short-term benefits to business units. Put another way, your colleagues don't need "SharePoint." They want a contracts management system, or a project scheduling utility, or any one of thousands of practical business services.

Ability to self-provision and employ SaaS-based solutions
This can be a tough one to swallow at an enterprise level, and you'll want to keep some controls in place. Yet, you also need to get ahead of practical business needs by offering some real alternatives, or your business colleagues will simply use their credit cards to buy what they need in the cloud.

Rise of Portal Lite
Rather than a big, heavy, developer-intensive enterprise portal, business units are increasingly seeking simpler forms of integration: basic dashboards / health meters, simple mash-ups, activity stream aggregation, and so on. And they want these services available ubiquitously, and not just in a corporate-wide portal. The good news is that some vendors are adapting. Are you?

Emphasis on collaboration and social
If you've spent the past three recessionary years trying to automate processes to cut costs, you're only getting half the picture. Sales, Marketing, R&D, Product Development, and other revenue-generating units want to be more agile, more innovative, and work more closely across silos. It takes much more than technology to do that successfully, but the right collaboration/social toolset is a key part of the overall solution here. When intranet teams deliver the wrong tools or approach, business units take matters into their own hands.

Blurring lines between enterprise applications and enterprise information
Employees don't want services bereft of supporting content; nor do they want content delivered in a way that's not immediately actionable. The sharp divide between applications and documents on most intranets is becoming anachronistic. Savvy intranet managers are focusing on content-enriched applications. The rise of mobile is really pushing this. Even the simplest static intranet "websites" make more sense as applications on mobile devices.

* * *

Let's not have a funeral. The death of the intranet heralds the re-birth of something better: a more practical set of tools that help people get their work done. Intranet managers should re-align with this new world and focus on services that businesspeople can use in the flow of their daily work. The digital workplace is actually less a specific place, but rather a mindset that creates services so badly needed that you'll never have to complain about "poor adoption" ever again.

That's hard, and you may skin your knees at first. Age-old challenges of security and interoperability can get tougher before they get better. Yet your colleagues are already looking way beyond your official intranet. It's worse to be irrelevant than to have experimented and failed. If we can help you, let us know...

* * *

P.S. This post was informed by some great chats at the recent KMWorld event with two of my favorite Digital Workplace gurus, Jane McConnell and Martin White.

Community venues are fast evolving. In the public sphere, the action has transitioned largely (though not completely) to public social networks, where innumerable sub-communities have emerged. Intra-enterprise investments, not surprisingly, have followed more slowly. However, we're seeing enterprises of all stripes paying greater attention to internal communities as key applications within the digital workplace.

But just what constitutes a community? And why is the answer important?

For starters, it's important to distinguish between a community versus simple interaction and feedback. If I comment on an article within my local newspaper website, am I joining a community? The newspaper might think so, but I don't, and it's my opinion as the poster that matters here. A community is something more than a collection of threaded comments -- however valuable those are in their own right -- and that "something more" is where added business value lies.

Intranet guru Jane McConnell defines communities as "Groups of people with a shared interest or practice, who communicate, exchange ideas, and collaborate." This is a great starting point, and I'll extend it with a short list of characteristics that I think make for a real community. If I'm missing some, please chime in with your comments.

Communities have explicit membership. Membership is more than just a login or even a profile, but a sense of belonging and commitment, which is much harder to define but extremely important. One sign of a real community is that members have actively annotated their profiles (with picture, interests, and so on). This in turn conveys obligations for community "owners" to understand members' commitment and manage accordingly -- i.e., with a deft hand that allows membership broad leeway to define where the community goes. By the way, for a great resource on this very issue, consult The Community Roundtable.

Members visit regularly, even without prompting. Members want to participate regularly, to see what the community is up to. Sure, signalling and alerts from the system are essential, and people will want to commune around useful new content, as well. Still, I find it interesting that on media and sports sites, readers will comment on new articles, but communities tend to form around particular stars or personas. Perhaps there are lessons here for internal enterprise communities.

Members have the ability and inclination to connect directly with each other. The nature of those connections will vary, and large communities need to account for a variety of different member-to-member interaction services. Member-to-member interaction separates true communities from workaday user generated content.

Note that I'm not suggesting that digital communities are the shining future of intranet and web interaction. There is a place for ad-hoc interactivity and many people simply don't want to join yet another community, either at work or outside work. The absence of a community does not mean you should forgo the possibility for pervasive interaction with you, the site owner.

Nevertheless, I believe communities are an increasingly important phenomenon, especially within enterprise firewalls. In fact, this phenomenon is one of the key reasons why savvier enterprises are reluctant to commit wholeheartedly to SharePoint (which famously lacks key community services), even as they leverage SharePoint's ample document-sharing and workflow services.

In any event, it's an area we are covering much more closely in our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software vendor evaluations. And I'm still trying to better understand all the nuances. So keep those questions coming...

Here at RSG, Kashyap will be evaluating DAM and Collaboration/Social products and vendors.

You can say hello to him here, and watch this space for his posts and advisory papers.

In the meantime, we continue to recruit for an analyst, consultant, and account executive, ideally based in the UK or continental Europe, though we're flexible for the ideal candidate.  Check out our careers page.

More importantly, by my count, this represents the fifth such Oracle announcement in ten years. The company cobbles together and re-brands various enterprise 2.0 offerings, but they never seem to pan out. This must be very frustrating for those of you who actually invested in one of the first four.

Sure, some enterprises will still try it. The tautological we-buy-Oracle-because-it's-Oracle customers still exist -- though they are getting scarcer, at least among our subscribers. If history is any predictor, they could find Oracle's latest offering a bit thin.

You see, Oracle has excellent software development capabilities when it choses to bring them to bear. Yet somehow, in the collaboration and social space, it has tended to favor marketing announcements over the kind of sustained commitment its enterprise customers require. Oracle execs will surely counter that "this time we really mean it." I'll believe it when customers start adopting Oracle Social Networking in droves because it's so good. A prudent enterprise will still let others skin their knees.

I'm not crowing here. Oracle's longterm abdication is mostly just sad -- not because I care about Oracle's success -- but because I believe the marketplace could benefit from a major competitor to SharePoint across all the functionality that Redmond's platform purports to do. If not Oracle, then who?

• Google? Focused too intently on the SMB marketplace
• IBM? Good stuff here and there, but divided and slow overall
• Open source? Promising in some areas but fragmented across technologies and platforms

To be sure, SharePoint has significant shortcomings in terms of social enterprise and collaboration services, there are a wealth of smaller alternatives, and this game is far from over. For Oracle customers, however, the question remains the same: is the company just upselling its WebCenter and database licensees, or delivering business services that can truly stand up to competitors on their own? We'll keep watching...

In any case, here's the raft of updates:

• OpenText Web Experience Management: The former Vignette platform continues to struggle under its own weight
• Oracle's FatWire Content Server: Nice technology -- up to a point -- but difficult new owners
• SDL Tridion: Getting more kaleidoscopic with each new version
• Sitecore: Uptown ambitions on a midtown base
• Joomla!: Midtown ambitions on a downtown base
• Hannon Hill: Finding a niche in academia
• TerminalFour: Ditto

If your organization subscribes to our Web CMS stream, you can access the updated evaluation chapters and comparison matrices here.

Alternatively, you can always obtain a sample excerpt of any of our evaluation reports.

1. The recent CMS trend towards website interaction management will get balanced by a renewed emphasis on content, driven by specialized mobile experience needs
2. For enterprise applications, mobile web will prove a better common denominator than mobile apps
3. The next frontier of Enterprise 2.0 lies in socializing existing applications and work processes, rather than creating new info and interaction silos

If any of that piques your interest, you can check out the interview above, or via our YouTube channel.

1. A SaaS offering which may or may not employ cloud-based infrastructure
2. Managed hosting services, perhaps from a partner, which may or may not employ cloud-based infrastructure

Depending on your requirements, either of these options could constitute an improvement relative to an on-premise installation in your own datacenter.

Things get trickier, though, when you consider exploiting true cloud services like Amazon EC2.  As enterprises transition to more dynamic, personalized services, site owners are bumping up against the limits of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to address performance at scale.  Now consider for a moment the largest WCM vendors who would ostensibly power the world's busiest (and therefore most cloud-interested) public sites.  Those vendors by and large have not helped their customers exploit cloud services. 

To be sure, there are some technical challenges here, though I don't think they're insurmountable.  Also, many enterprises just don't want to extend to cloud-based infrastructure on principle, sometimes for very good reasons.

However, I believe the real problem -- the part that has vendors pausing on both public and private clouds -- is licensing models.  Unlike collaboration or document management tools, most WCM tool licensing is weighted heavily towards CPUs rather than seats.  Vendors who were already hiccuping on pricing models for virtualized internal deployments seem positively hogtied about cloud installations.

What should you do?  If you want to investigate cloud-based infrastructure for your increasingly dynamic WCM installation, press your vendor to come up with more value-based pricing, something that may expand with your success, but also contract if you shrink their footprint.  Right now, most licensing models have you paying for unused capacity.  Elasticity should go both ways. 

As you explore your alternatives, we're happy to help.

To quote from the position description:

Above all, your loyalties lie instinctively with software consumers rather than producers. We're looking for "truth detectors."

We have a strong preference for candidates in one of the following locales: UK or Northern Europe; Delhi, India; North America (ideally Northeast Corridor). See the description for application details.

Case in point: the product formerly known as RedDot, which became OpenText Web Solutions, but is now re-branded "OpenText Web Site Management."  RedDot boasts a long and storied past. However, it started falling behind its competitors even before getting acquired by Hummingbird in 2005. RedDot got absorbed uneasily into OpenText in 2006, and then was eclipsed by the latter's acquisition of Vignette in 2009.

We stopped reviewing Web Site Management earlier this year, as we added evaluations for more modern Web CMS platforms that address similar niches, such as Kentico, Telerik, and soon Umbraco and others. (Our WCM stream subscribers can still access an archived version of our last Web Site Management evaluation.) We continue to evaluate the former Vignette VCM, now "OpenText Web Experience Management."

To be sure, OpenText Web Site Management is not officially dead, yet. OpenText continues to support it, schedules training classes, and occasionally releases some minor enhancements. The vendor seems to be paying special attention to its large German installed base. Over the years, though, OpenText has appeared almost embarrassed by RedDot, treating it like a chronically misbehaved child who -- while obliged at home -- must be kept hidden from guests. Today, OpenText doesn't bother to link to its Web Site Management offering from its own WCM index page. If you dig, you can find the official product subsite off on its own digital island.

In practical terms, the Web Site Management offering is in a death spiral. The most telling indicator is a near complete evaporation of its North American and UK partner channels. There are fewer and fewer people around who know how to keep a RedDot implementation stable, let alone healthy. That's irrevocably bad.

What should you do? I'll share the advice we give our subscribers who call to ask about this product:

• If you are an existing OpenText Web Site Management customer, you should prepare for a strategic replacement, although the availability of ongoing support means that you can do this on your own schedule (and kudos to OpenText for that)
• If you are a prospective customer, don't bother considering Web Site Management

Since I don't know when OpenText will finally pull the plug, I'll just deliver a well-deserved requiem right now. Let's remember some very important lessons that RedDot proved back when it was still very much alive: That business users want a more WYSIWYG experience. That European vendors can successfully cross the Atlantic to add strong alternatives to the North American market. That building CMS tools on Microsoft technologies should not be left exclusively to Redmond. That a large segment of mid-market customers wants something in-between enterprisey platforms and simplistic site publishing tools.

The fact that other vendors have taken these lessons much further is no dent in RedDot's original accomplishments. Yet it's also a lesson for you the customer to stay vigilant about warning signs in a failing platform. RedDot's situation was already very grave four years ago. For our part, we'll keep watching on your behalf.

So that's why I was really looking forward to seeing SharePoint 2010's Service Pack 1 (SP1), which was just released yesterday.  You see, some Microsoft officials had been quietly hinting that -- contrary to previous history -- the company would look at putting more significant functional improvements into SharePoint service packs, in an effort to become more agile in the face of evolving customer demands.

Redmond will point to a few niceties in SP1, like Chrome support and some migration enhancements. Yet nearly all the improvements constitute bug fixes or minor system administration enhancements.

To be fair, Microsoft is very good at bug fixes. Note the attention to addressing problems like, "Hebrew dates that are displayed in group headers in an XSLTListViewWebPart are incorrect when grouping is enabled" or "On Galician blog sites, the date box on the left side of a blog entry shows the month and the day reversed."  Not what you'd consider mission-critical lapses in the original release, but now they're fixed. This is a service pack on top of a platform that's already quite stable and reliable, compared to its smaller peers in the marketplace.

What's disappointing about SP1 is what it didn't include. Nothing to close the increasingly yawning gap in the platform's native social computing services. No e-marketing applications to make SharePoint's website publishing service relevant for this decade. Nothing particularly interesting to businesspeople at all (Galician bloggers excepted).

By now you also know Redmond's reply: you can find partners to develop all those applications for you. That's a good business for those firms -- and a lot of money for you.

Well, I'll be waiting on SP2, but with less bated breath...

There's a longstanding question about how effectively Big Blue can evolve Connections. Born as a collection of disparate services, the past few years have seen IBM trying to stabilize and integrate the platform, rather than really push it beyond the wide plethora of smaller competitors with more business-friendly offerings.

To be fair, the latest Connections dot-release provides a few more semi-finished social applications (e.g., for "ideation"). Contrast this with SharePoint, where -- at least until version-next in 2013 -- someone actually has to build social applications for you. Presumably, more Connections applications will be forthcoming.

As a customer investigating this marketplace, though, you should focus primarily on what Connections provides today, rather than dream about potential applications that may or may not pan out. This is a surprisingly complex platform -- and like most IBM software, it will cost you serious implementation multiples.

If you're curious to see more about our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software comparative evaluations, you can download a sample excerpt.

• Adobe CQ: Not yet very Adobified (but do you care?)
• Alfresco: On-again off-again love affair with WCM continues...
• Autonomy: On a clear day you can still see Interwoven
• DotNetNuke: In the midst of a long modernization program
• Ektron: Still marching to its own drummer
• eZ Publish: No, it hasn't gone away...
• Kentico: Features are shallow, but so is the price
• MS SharePoint: For WCM, an expensive development platform

If your organization is a Web CMS stream subscriber, you can access the updated evaluation chapters and comparison matrices here.

If you have never seen our WCM research, you can obtain a sample excerpt here.

There's widely-held opinion that all information should be open and free. We could debate that, but hopefully everyone can concur that analysis and critical judgement are value-adds on top of basic information. This value-add often stems from long historical perspective about a vendor, tool, technology segment, and methodologies. So the question becomes: how to underwrite the production of that value-add?

Today you'll find many individual analysts and boutique firms who follow a consulting model. They publish analysis freely as a loss-leader to generate consulting business. This is a viable model that can work very well for many different types of analysis, but doesn't work well for product evaluations, because this approach:

1. Doesn't support the iteration and time required for a real excavation of vendor weaknesses and strengths across a meaningful swath of any marketplace -- i.e., not just the "top" vendors
2. Frequently leads to consulting work with individual vendors; I don't have a problem with (other) analysts working for vendors, but that then should preclude them from evaluating the tools they helped shape

To be fair, we perform some consulting too -- only for end-users, primarily for subscribers who request extra advice -- and sometimes we struggle to find the right balance betweeen research and practice. To be a good analyst, you need to do both.

Thousands of organizations have found the prices we charge for the long experience behind our evaluation reports more than fair. I hope you'll discover the same.

One big area of confusion lies around pasting content from Word. Yes, many people still want to do this, often for good reason. I've been mentoring several of our research customers through vendor demos lately, and in a simulated environment, Word copy-paste can demo pretty well. It's in the real world that problems start cropping up.

Vendors talk a lot about differentiating features, but when copy-pasting Word to HTML, you really just have two broad choices:

1. Retain visual fidelity, which means passing Office-specific mark-up through to the page
2. Maintain pure HTML standard mark-up, which inevitably means losing at least some visual fidelity upon paste

You can see where this is going: contributors tend to prefer the former; web and IT managers prefer the latter.

Incidentally, this challenge is not limited to Word. Try pasting some marked-up content from Google Docs into your CMS rich text editor, then view source and check out the funky extra mark-up.

Some vendors try to work around this by offering the contributor different choices at paste-time, often reflected as different tiny icons in the editor toolbar. That sounds promising, but requires careful education, and will lead to inconsistent behavior on your rendered pages.

If you have to train your colleagues one way or another, then I'd typically recommend defaulting to clean-HTML and show people how to fix the formatting as necessary within the editor itself. Yes, this could lead to more help-desk calls ("the editor is broken!"), but the point is to satisfy site visitors, and they want clean, light, accessible, readable pages.

In our evaluations of 40+ Web CMS vendors, we pay very careful attention to the authoring and editorial interfaces. Far from a commodity, the contributor experience can actually represent key differentiators among the tools. You need to watch carefully for things like homegrown rich text editors -- a clear warning sign. Or, you can ask us to watch for you. Either way, assess your choices carefully.

• Acquia Drupal Commons: still waiting on Drupal 7
• NewsGator Social Sites: backfilling SharePoint is neither simple nor cheap
• Socialtext: more than a wiki, but less than a complete platform

As always, the report offers handy charts to compare and contrast these tools against their key competitors. If you're a subscriber, you can download the individual chapters here. If you're not yet a customer, you can sample a free excerpt here.

You might think it would be otherwise. You might think that with savvier customers -- bringing greater experience and higher expectations -- enterprises would be leveraging the full breadth of what modern Web CMS tools can bring. For the most part, this is simply not the case.

Media and analyst reports can contribute to the sense that you're falling behind. Well, you're almost surely not. Today's analyst-vendor echo chamber is mostly an insiders' discussion over PowerPoints between current and former product managers. The latest breathless case study -- or the success stories you may see get posted in comments below -- are alluring, but also more the exception than the rule.

So while the products are increasingly feature-rich, from everything I can see, customers are using a smaller percentage of their web publishing tools than ever.

Implementation partners often know the real score. I recently listened to two different Sitecore integrators caution a prospect about Sitecore's Online Marketing Suite (OMS), one calling it "demo candy" that none of their customers were actually using. There's nothing wrong with the ambition behind OMS, except that in the real world it's extraordinarily complicated to deploy, and assumes you possess sufficient time and resources to properly exploit its personalization and metrics functionality. (It also assumes you're not obtaining those services from a 3rd-party provider -- a different story for a different post.)

What's going on? Well, for starters, you can find many dozen credible but smallish WCM vendors and open source projects competing out there. A rising tide is lifting all their boats, but they're all trying to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. Those vendors have also largely (though not completely) ceded Intranet scenarios to SharePoint, and therefore focus more intently than ever on providing e-marketing services. Nothing wrong with that, except those features require substantial effort to exploit.

Sure, online marketing is increasingly important, even in an intranet context. Some advice: try to improve your internal competencies and datasets before investing in new tools. When you're ready to venture into the software marketplace, our updated evaluations now critique vendors across a wide range of engagement and experience-management services.