One of the fastest ways to mobilize your existing websites is to license special mobile middleware tools.  These tools access source content on your existing site but then apply a mobile-friendly layout to it. Key players include Dudamobile (also offered by Google via its GoMo initiative), dotMobi (offered by many hosting providers like GoDaddy) and many others of various types including open source libraries.

Most such "mobilize-an-existing-site" approaches work in a similar way. They act as a proxy between the visitor and your site and then perform what was classically called screen-scraping or web-clipping. Once they scrape content, they can then re-purpose and serve it to mobile devices.

Besides being a quick approach, proponents argue that you can reuse your existing site without making any major changes and thus save money, time, and hassle. I don't disagree with that conclusion, but I see this only as a short-term stopgap that you should consider while you evaluate a long-term approach.

The reason is, there are several problems with this quick-fix approach:

1. You've added an additional layer between your visitor and content. This obviously has performance implications because typically, screen-scraping happens on the fly. Sure, you can optimize and cache some of it, but you still have an additional layer to worry about.
2. This one proxy can become a single point of failure that's probably outside of your control, despite your other investments in rendundancy and reliability that you or your hosting partner have made. 
3. There are many problems with screen scraping itself. The quality of results will depend on the nature of the JavaScript, AJAX, CSS, and Forms code you've applied.  Your mileage will vary.

Besides these technical issues, my bigger problem is that this approach considers mobile as an "add-on" and not necessarily a channel becoming as important or more so than desktop access.

My recommendation to to our subscribers who are evaluating how to mobilize their web presence is to certainly consider this approach -- but only as a quick-and-dirty solution. If required, you should go back to the basics and evolve a strategy that treats mobile users with respect they deserve. This will inevitably require taking a hard look at your content strategy and your CMS technology. In fact, our recently released version 21 of Web Content and Experience Management (WCXM) Evaluation Stream specifically covers mobile capabilities of all the tools covered in that stream.

If you are an RSG subscriber looking for more personalized guidance, you can place an advisory session request here.

They pointed out that, like SharePoint of yore, Drupal was becoming all the rage among US federal web managers under the current administration. So naturally, this SI went looking for experienced Drupal talent. And could not find any. You see, as readers of our WCXM or Social Collaboration evaluations know, experienced Drupal talent comes in short supply, especially since Drupal fanboys promote it as the hammer for every nail (which it certainly is not). 

So what were these SI managers going to do? What nearly everyone else does: find some PHP developers, train them up on Drupal for several months, and hope they stick around for at least a year. That's exciting for the developer community, but what about you the customer? This sort of dislocation can be very jarring to your project and is something to consider when selecting tools.

No, I'm not suggesting you select some dullard WCXM product so that you can find cheap, unemployed developers. Rather, I'm suggesting that you build hype coefficients into your longterm total-cost-of-ownership calcuations. The more hyped the tool, the more you'll have to spend to get foundational advice. In some cases, a lot more.

And foundational advice is critical to any longterm investment. Ask a developer or architect to talk about their first two implementations with any tool. They'll roll their eyes and explain what they'd do differently if they had it all over again. Fine for them -- they got paid. Tough for you the customer.

Be sure to contract with seasoned implementers with at least 3 projects under their belt with any particular vendor. That's meaningful experience. And with Drupal, it's very hard to find today...

First and foremost, you will notice the name change: from WCM to WCXM.  To be clear, we're not after adding more ingredients to the acronym soup. However, the marketplace is undeniably changing. Customers and vendors are moving towards more sophisticated ways of managing their web content and the resulting customer experience. It is no longer just about managing content or just on the web.

With this in mind, we have also updated our scenarios and vendor ratings criteria to reflect the latest use cases, and features and functions we evaluate in the WCXM products.  For example, we pay much greater attention to mobile capabilities, which are surprisingly weak in this class of tools.

Version 21.0 also includes updated reviews of the following vendors:

• EPiServer – focusing on mobile and commerce with Mediachase acquisition, but highlighted by slow penetration in North America despite many hires
• Joomla! – slow progression with some concerns from the community about the impact of the long-awaited major 2.5 release
• Drupal – increasing commercialization under the watchful eye of Acquia, coupled with major talent shortage

Another key theme comes courtesy of today's press release: the increasing trend toward commercialization of open source Web Content & Experience Management (WCXM) solutions.

What does that mean for you, the buyer? You need to keep an eye on the narrowing gulf between open source and proprietary business models and how they might affect your CMS purchasing decision.

We’ve discontinued coverage of the following Web CMS vendors (though you can still access archived versions of our reviews):

• EMC | Documentum (now sunset)
• VYRE
• PaperThin
• Oracle (UCM) -- maintaining coverage of former FatWire tool
• Alterian (acquired by SDL)

We’ll be adding new vendors, including ModX and SalesForce, in forthcoming updates to the WCXM stream.

As always, our WCXM stream subscribers can download Version 21 in its entirety, or just individual chapters, and comparison charts immediately. For those of you not familiar with our evaluations, go ahead and download a free sample here.

So how far has Oracle progressed? Well, there’s a new contributor UI, a new page builder, deprecation of SOAP-based Web Services, dropped support for JBoss application server, and some other changes.

The new contributor interface, replacing some of the older content contribution interfaces, seems to have been released in a hurry. If you don't believe me, just look at the number of issues related to the UI in release notes. For example, it does not support your browser's back button, and dashboard widgets cannot be moved around if you use IE9. Safari is not yet supported at all.

But all of this is really minor. It’s been a year since Oracle acquired FatWire, and I believe customers were hoping for more meaningful changes. But the name change appears to be the biggest change so far in terms of integrating former FatWire with the WebCenter family. While I realize platform integration can take a while to transpire, WebCenter Sites still looks and acts like a standalone product -- with its separate infrastructure requirements, different user and content repositories, and even its own middleware/integration framework.

Many features remain confusingly duplicated across different WebCenter modules; for example, support for gadgets, blogs, and wikis.

So in summary, Oracle has not done anything to unify and simplify things.  For now, the branding seems to be the only glue.

To be sure, a standalone product may not be a bad option for many scenarios and the product formerly known as Content Server does have many strengths including a well-regarded architecture as we have described in our Web Content and Experience Management Evaluations. 

So, if you’re evaluating WebCenter Sites as a potential web content and experience management tool, consider it on its own merit and not just because you've already made other WebCenter investments. Integrating Sites with your existing WebCenter modules is likely to be far from trivial, despite of what your sales rep tells you.

Reportedly, the so called "Apple Tax" -- whereby developers pay 30% of revenues to Apple -- along with lack of access to customer data, are the main reasons prompting FT.com to follow others (including Amazon who did the same thing with their Kindle app).

Many argue that the 30% revenue share for Apple is reasonable in exchange for providing a storefront and app store management. I agree with that, and suspect this tax may not be a big reason. In any case, without Apple's app store, developers will need to manage their own download facilities and storefronts (and spend money doing that).  The 30% fee for repeat subscribers, though could be tougher to swallow.

A more important rationale for FT's move may lie in having no access to subscriber information -- something anathema to any publisher.

However, commercial considerations aside, there are more practical and technical reasons as well.

As we pointed out here and here, native apps have an edge over web apps for many scenarios when it comes to user experience and performance. However, native apps bring many challenges in a world of diverse device types and operating systems. The two dominant platforms -- iOS and Android -- themselves have many variations in terms of screen sizes and device capabilities. For example, the recently released "new iPad" may be the state of the art iOS device, but you will also need to support iPad 1 and iPad 2. On top of it, there are constant rumors of a different-sized iPad. The android-based device marketplace is even more fragmented. Now add Microsoft's Windows and RIM's Blackberry to the mix and you can easily see that having to develop and maintain native applications for all these is not a scalable proposition.

Having a standards-based (read: HTML5-based) app, either a web app or a hybrid app, will allow FT.com to target a much wider reader base with only an incremental effort required to support another device/OS variation in future.

To be sure, there are still advantages of native apps, but many of those are slowly getting eroded, at least for the most common scenarios such as news and content consumption. So if like many of our subscribers, you too are evaluating your mobile development strategies, do consider a web based app for your scenario and then decide whether you still need a native app. We explore this topic further in a recent advisory briefing.

Probably the best primer on that subject -- how the internet works the way it does -- is John Naughton's "A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet." Straightforward without being over-basic, it traces the history of the internet from ARPAnet, through NSFnet, to the internet that we are familiar with today. It might be over a decade since it was published, but it's still one I recommend to people interested in internet history.

Predicting the future often involves a good grasp on the past, and in that vein Naughton's recent column "Graphic designers are ruining the web" in the Observer newspaper brought back an old topic of web page weight to the fore. 

He cites a statistic that "[between] 2003 to 2011, the average web page grew from 93.7kB to over 679kB." He goes go on to blame this on what he terms "graphic designers" (falling into that trap of conflating graphic design with web design). Naturally this brought on a bit of a backlash, not least from his own publication's tech team.

It's a good time to have this debate.   The real challenge here for digital managers -- performance for the end-user -- is not going away.  I've just written an advisory briefing for our subscribers, "Address Emerging Threats to Website Performance," which reviews some web development trends that are increasingly having a negative effect upon website user experience.

While Naughton cites images as being the baddies, the real performance culprit lies to a great extent with the vast number of remote elements that go together to make up contemporary pages -- such as advertising and analytics calls. The performance of these elements is difficut to predict, yet all go together to produce the final page render time.

Add to that the increasing complexity and dependency placed upon JavaScript and the yawning gap between available broadband and mobile bandwidths, it must make digital professionals yearn for the days when all they did have to worry about in terms of site performance was image optimization!

As I point out in today's release, the key is to carefully balance web architectures with data architectures...

The answer that most portal vendors give you may not be very satisfying. You see, most portal solutions display chunks of information and services (portlets or web parts) via some sort of "theming" mechanism that lays those chunks out on a page. Naturally, their typical answer to the mobile challenge is to develop "mobile themes."

Mobile themes typically work like this. The portal detects the device or mobile operating system and streams your portlets one by one in a different order, perhaps leaving some of them out entirely. That's a nice short-cut for a hard problem, but note that it's not true adaptive design.

Consider for a moment the home page of noted portal vendor, Liferay. Here's the default view in a desktop browser.

Now let's look at the series of screens for that same URL that get presented by Liferay's mobile-aware theme.  You'll see that they stripped out some extraneous or not-mobile-ready portlets.  Here they are, top to bottom.

* * *

* * *

It's essentially a subset of portlets that have been concatenated vertically as I scroll down my iPhone. That's not a bad solution. It allows you to easily re-use existing components and prioritize them in different ways. I recently talked to one intranet manager who gloried in excising various lame-but-company-mandated web parts (e.g., CEO's speech) from her SharePoint mobile site.

The problem here is that stacking portlets and web parts does not necessarily lead to a great mobile experience. The same goes for simplistic mobile templates in a Web Content & Experience Management (WCXM) platform that simply streams down existing page elements in a specific order. The advantage to a WCXM platform, though, is that you typically have simple programmatic access to individual data fields, which means that you can modify the mobile experience at a much finer level.

Meanwhile, back on Liferay's inner pages, their default theme breaks down a bit. The first two screens on any inner page are always the top- and sub-nav respectively, which kind of gets in the way of the real content. To be sure, Liferay could create a different mobile theme for inner pages, though here again, that approach would probably require breaking out of the portlet motif.

In the end, there's two ways to think about mobile web experience:

1. From the top down, taking a subset of your existing, pre-built components and ordering them in a sensible way
2. From the bottom up, rethinking what content and services (and their associated display) make the most sense for your mobile visitors, and re-assembling from scratch

The former is much easier. The latter is much more valuable.

To be sure, other portal vendors suffer from similar deficiencies. For more details on how the top Portal vendors differ in their support for mobile-enablement, consult our detailed Enterprise Portal vendor evaluations.

Many commentators compare Drive with Dropbox and to some extent Microsoft's SkyDrive and Apple's iCloud. However, you should remember that you have many, many more choices.

On the face of it, most such services appear similar. They usually provide:

• Space for storing files (free up to a limit and then for-pay based on tiers)
• Syncing files with your various devices so you can access them on the move

However, once you move beyond the "mine is bigger than yours" debate, you will notice there are subtle differences among these services.

At a high level, I see four categories of services here:

1. Consumer oriented: Services like iCloud, Dropbox, and SugarSync are really focused on end users and have built some differentiating features. Dropbox, for example even has a Linux client and SugarSync allows you to sync any folder on your desktop and not just the one dedicated folder that most other services mandate.
    
2. File shares with document creation: Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive fall in this category. They are still focused on end consumers but allow more than just file sharing and storage. With Drive, you can edit and create documents using Google Docs, while with SkyDrive, you can access Microsoft Office WebApps.
    
3. Enterprise Focused: This category includes services like Box, Huddle, Oxygen, Citrix ShareFile, Glasscubes, Skydox and many others. These really focus on the enterprise segment. Box (like most others in this category) for example, provides granular controls for administrators to maintain access control for files and directories.
    
4. File shares with light collaboration: This category includes tools such as Alfresco and eXo which have traditionally focused on other enterprise needs (Alfresco does Document Management while eXo is a Portal platform), but have now started offering a cloud service that has some bit of file sharing. You could also consider SharePoint Online / Office365 in this camp.  These tools, however, typically lack advanced capabilities, such as file sync across devices.

Doubtless some of these services could be placed into multiple categories, and some will eventually evolve to provide services focused on more than one category.

But if you are an enterprise evaluating these sort of services for your needs, remember to look beyond the hype. Our forthcoming Cloud File Share evaluation research will look at such issues more closely and provide detailed evaluations of these vendors. Meanwhile, if you have any feedback on these categories, please feel free to contact me or leave a comment below.

At the NAB show, futurist Marina Gorbis talked about the seismic shifts taking place in the world of content creation and used examples of installation art pieces to illustrate trends like algorithmic content and non-human content creation.

Exhibit 1 is what I call "real-time fashion". In 1998, artist Nancy Paterson created a stock market skirt . Economists say there is a relationship between the stock market and fashion fluctuations. If the market is doing well, the skirt length reduces and if the markets are floundering, the length increases. The installation art consists of the mannequin Judy, a computer, several display monitors, and a mechanical system of motors, cables and pulleys. Some Perl scripts analyzed online stock quotes, and the skirt length adjusted accordingly.

"Painting the town LED" is Exhibit 2. In Erik Krikortz's art project Emotional Cities, the aggregated responses to "How are you feeling today" are used to light up a city's skyscrapers and serve to illumine the city's zeitgeist. You'll recognize the more prosaic version of this as "sentiment analysis" which is increasingly being added to marketers' tool kit.

Not mentioned by Gorbis but Exhibit 3 is "Writing on the wall". The Think Exhibition at New York's Lincoln Center to commemorate IBM's centenary consisted of a 123 feet long data visualization wall, which displayed dynamic patterns based on data feeds from the city's traffic, pollution, and sunshine indicators. The art on display was not a Da Vinci, but perhaps a Fibonacci.

Conventional notions of what constitutes art get challenged in these explorations. Similarly in an age of convergence, boundaries blur and traditional categorizations like platforms and channels can crumble.

Metadata so far has been operating in a linear, unidimensional fashion and has been helping make only basic connections and discovery for us. Are our information models, sense-making apparatus, and systems (and yes, even our own evaluations) ready for this brave beautiful world of multi-dimensional interconnectedness? What do we need to get ready?

Welcome your comments below...

Of course, one of the most satisfying parts of building with Lego is the interoperability of the parts, the way they snap together with a real feeling of rigidity. You can mix and match parts from different kits to create your own designs whenever inspiration takes you. I do wonder whether if that's why I took to being a developer with great enthuiasm.

A few weeks ago, before the London weather decided to bring us a year's rainfall in less than a week, I spent a sunny weekday lunchtime catching up with an old colleague. Before long, conversation turned -- as it generally does with nerds -- to development. One thing that came up in that discussion stuck with me: "I wish people would remember that APIs are not Lego."

Software vendors are very fond of APIs. So fond that they often see the mere existence of an API in their product as a fait accompli in and of itself. However, what this really means in practical terms is, "We're giving you a way of making our product work with others you might already own employing code you'll to have to build and maintain yourself. Oh, and it's going to be pretty-much proprietary. Maybe you'd like to buy some training?"

Not only are APIs certainly not like Lego, they are not equal. Talk to a developer and you'll find out pretty quickly that they range from the well-formed and functional to the fiendishly complex and arcane. Then ask about the documentation. Then probably buy them a beer to recover from having to relive personal nightmares.

The chances are that every piece of software you purchase is going to have to work with a range of others that you already own. Unlike Lego, they won't snap together simply. You'll have to tease them in place via an integration.

The good news is that you probably know well in advance how you like this to work at a business process level -- e.g., content from System A should be sent to System B under circumstances XYZ --- long before you start any purchase cycle. This should become one of your test scenarios that you can subsequently use to help decide which supplier offers the best  technical fit. (Vendor fit is another thing.)

So when you ask "How?" and a prospective supplier answers with, "...via our extensive range of APIs," be sure to request documentation to illustrate their answer. And then validate with developers or with your systems integrator. 

Whilst accidentally treading on a Lego brick in bare feet is one of life's more painful experiences, relying on an unknown and untested API to meet a critical need to your business can bring about much more lasting pain...

We recommend that you make Content Migration a part of your overall project and start planning for it from the very outset. This will allow you analyze your content and make improvements to overall content quality. You will also have better chance of keeping your project on track and avoid any major cost or schedule overruns.

In our recent advisory briefing, Start Your Content Migration Planning Early, we lay out what migration activities you need to plan or execute at each stage in a project, from team selection to piloting.

This advisory is for subscribers to our Collaboration, DAM, ECM, SharePoint, Search, CMS or Portals streams.

For more about content migration, you should also check out our earlier advisory, A Guide to Successful Content Migration in conjunction with this one.

On May 9, we'll be conducting a webinar that will answer those questions and shed light on:

• How you should think about cloud options for your technology solutions
• Creating a mobile strategy that actually improves, rather than hinders, the customer brand experience
• Why implementing social tools without a proper business strategy can lead to disastrous results

You can register for this free webinar here. 

This webinar will be a preview of many of the topics that we will be discussing in depth at this year's info360 conference. In NYC on June 12-14, we'll be presenting a number of sessions including:

Social Workplace Market Overview 2012

Keynote: Consumerization of IT

Acronym Soup: ECM, WCM, CMS, WEM, CEM, DAM Dissected

The Right Way to Select Enterprise Collaboration Technology

DAM (Digital Asset Management) 101

Understanding the Marketing Technologist Toolkit

How to Negotiate the Right Price for Enterprise Software

The Advance Rates to the conference are available until May 4. We look forward to seeing many of you in New York!

The reason is not difficult to find.

Many Portal tools have built some basic capabilities for managing content. In the same way, many Web Content Management tools have built capabilities for managing web site experience and thus evolving into what we term as Web Content and Experience Management (WXCM) offerings.

Because of this convergence (at least in terms of broad features), there are cases you could employ either a portal tool such as IBM WebSphere, Liferay, Microsoft SharePoint or many of the tools we evaluate in our Portals and Content Integration stream, as well as use a WXCM tool such as Oracle Fatwire, Adobe Day, Sitecore or one of the other 42 tools we evaluate in our WXCM stream.

Nevertheless, while it may be theoretically possible to swap a portal or a WCXM tool, usually one offers a better fit than the other. You must consider the subtle differences between these two types of technologies, since each one provides a different approach to building and managing digital environments. You should also understand that there are rare occasions when you may need both a portal and WCXM platform.

In our recently released advisory briefing,"Portal or Web CMS: Which One Makes Sense for Your Use Case?," we explore this very topic and provide some guidance on when to use which approach. The table of contents for the advisory is as follows:

• Key Takeaways
• Introduction
• Example Dilemma: A Self-Service Employee Intranet
• When to Use Portal Technology
• When to Use a WCXM System
• Summary
• Additional Notes

The advisory briefing is available to our Portal and Web CMS research stream subscribers.

Think of these acquisitions as Photoshop layers and filters that go into the composition of a very complex picture of the product known as the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, which incorporates approximately 17 SaaS-based distinct products under its roof. Sounds complex, right? It could prove be a goldmine for Adobe and its partner channel, but a very dark tunnel for its customers.

Adding to the complexity is Adobe’s data-driven digital marketing approach. It’s not surprising that Adobe has 27 data centers around the world and processes six trillion transactions (e.g., a mouse click) a year. More Big Data doesn't mean better data, or better marketing decisions. Software is as important as the processes and people. Despite much automation that machines can do, any Omniture customers will confirm that you still need analytics geeks in addition to marketers, IT, and other members of your organization.

Complexities aside, there was a lot of insightful talk at the Summit – particularly, the ideas about Digital Self (your profile and how it can be utilized by marketers), predictive insights, adaptive content, social analytics, and getting technology out of the way of marketers. A myriad of announcements were also made. Let me highlight a few:

• Launch of "Adobe Social," based on the Context Optional/Efficient Frontier acquisition, with the idea of social publishing, monitoring, engagement, ad buying, and analytics
• Predictive Marketing: Leverage historical data to predict future results and uncover behavior patterns for better targeting
• Launch of CQ 5.5: Updated version of the Web Experience Management (WEM) system with more meaningful integrations into Scene7, Search&Promote, and SiteCatalyst
• New eCommerce features via a partnership with hybris
• Adobe Discover addition of cross-visit analytics across multiple online properties.

One of the areas that Adobe is still not caught up on yet is Digital Asset Management in the context of digital marketing. “Expect us to step up,” said Kevin Lynch, the company’s CTO, as Adobe plans to further its CQ DAM and Scene7 products.

Adobe spans across multiple categories in our forthcoming Digital Marketing evaluation research, with very few rivals that can boast a comparable set of capabilities. I can think of Salesforce, Google, IBM, and maybe Oracle in terms of breadth. While Adobe doesn't exactly hold a monopoly in this space, their mantra is, “to be the standard for the way digital marketing and advertising is created, managed, executed, measured and optimized.”

The issue is whether you're really best served by doing digital marketing the Adobe Way. Adobe's Digital Marketing Suite is a complex panorama of technologies, with some layers still unrealized. A dizzying array of tools is typically not the ideal first step for solving real business problems.

Consider that:

• Mobile has been a big driver of cloud
• Tablets (iPad in particular) have become increasingly prevalent within enterprises
• Enterprises are paying more attention to cloud and mobile

Since Box wants to become more enterprise-y, it has taken advantage of these trends, witnessed most recently by its announcement a new offering called OneCloud.

First a little techie lesson: each application on an iPad has its own file system -- a sort of a sandbox that other applications can't access. What this means is that if you create a document using iWork, it is stored in iWork's filesystem. If you wanted to edit it later with say Quickoffice or store it in Evernote, you couldn't do it (or let's say it's not trivial to do so). So there's no shared file system and nothing like a (Mac) Finder or (Windows) Explorer that allows you to navigate the file system on your device and open files as you'd like to. This kind of sandboxing has obvious limitations in the way iPad can be used productively.

Box released its OneCloud offering last week to try to solve this problem. It wants to become that shared file system that all other applications can access. For now, Box offers integration with 30 apps, albeit with a tighter integration among just four. Box calls the latter "premier apps," meaning you can do a bidirectional or as Box calls it, a round-trip integration between these apps and Box. You install these apps from within Box's iPad client. Think of it as a virtual operating system within iPad's iOS.

This is an interesting attempt, although certainly not the first one of its kind, despite what Box's PR would have you believe. For example, another cloud file sharing vendor, Oxygen also provides integration with 3rd-party apps, including with those that Box announced. Oxygen, in fact exposes itself as a WebDav folder, which basically means you can use it with pretty much any application.

At this point, Box's approach seems cleaner and more user-friendly. But it also means that for optimal benefit, you have to always be connected to the Web -- not a big deal for most but certainly a big deal for many countries (including India) where unlimited mobile data plans are either a farce or painfully expensive.

Many tools want to be that single repository for your enterprise. Alfresco attempted this with its own Cloud offering and integration with Dropbox to target mobile and iPad users. Now, even though Box still lacks quite a few essential features required to manage enterprise content, it has staked its claim to be a single repository of all your content with OneCloud. We will see how this latest attempt to consumerize enterprise systems pans out.

By the way, we will review Box, Oxygen (and a few other vendors) -- including how they differ in approach -- in our forthcoming Cloud File Sharing Tools evaluation stream.

Anything to add? Use the comments, below.

I am conducting a free webinar this Wednesday that will help you make sense of different content technologies. In this webinar, I will look at the requirements for a range of scenarios while explaining the differences among web content management (WCM), document management (DM or ECM), portals, collaboration, and digital & media asset management (DAM & MAM) systems.

The webinar will be fast and informative. I invite you to join me. If you have questions that you want addressed in the webinar, please feel free to email me, leave a comment below, or tweet me.

Webinar details: 7 March 2012 at 12:00 noon EST (17:00 UTC).

Register for the webinar.

Polopoly (owned by UK-based publishing systems giant Atex) and Escenic (owned by German Norwegian digital media supplier Vizrt) have long dominated the publishing-derived WCM market in Europe, especially the UK where Escenic drives the majority of national newspaper websites. Both products originated within newspapers or had newspapers as their original primary customers and as such have a wealth of experience in delivering media-driven websites.

Like other WCM vendors, CoreMedia in the past has had its fair share of dalliances with the media segment (with a particular emphasis on broadcast media), offset by waves of interest in other customer verticals, like telcos.  The vendor's new media-tuned version will have to prove compelling enough to tempt media organizations away from established tools and vendors, as well as comparatively sophisticated bespoke platforms, and that's not always easy. Customers should welcome more competition, though.

As ever, we'll be monitoring with interest. All three vendors are covered in detail in our WXCM report, and we'll be looking forward to hearing from CoreMedia customers about how these new functionalities work in practice.

There are clear advantages to the SaaS WCXM model: get rid of the extra IT support overhead and the burden of installation, maintenance, hardware support. In the same breath, SaaS WCXM vendors are failing to pervade the WCXM marketplace.

We’ve seen some M&A activity in this segment in the past year, but little meaningful product development.  For more details, consult our recently updated 2012 WCXM "Cross Check" marketplace analysis.

Now, if you're evaluating a cloud WCXM supplier (either SaaS, managed hosting, or true cloud), you might be thinking about things like data security risks. Security is important, but other requirements may emerge as equally salient. For example, your WCXM system will likely need to “talk” to other pieces of software in your enterprise ecosystem. At least from our experience, as integration requirements get more sophisticated, SaaS vendors increasingly fall short, particularly when it comes to the layer of experience management functionality in addition to good ol’ web content management.

But I'm also curious about your experience. Have you been evaluating or experimenting with cloud-based deployments of on-premise WCXM solutions? Or worked with a true SaaS WCXM system? I’d love to hear about your victories and challenges.

As I noted in this blog post, Digital Marketing can cover a panoply of different tools and technologies for Marketers. In our new research, we will cover vendors that focus on the following aspects of Digital Marketing:

• Lead Management (Including lead acquisition, contact management, qualification, scoring, routing, nurturing, and analytics)
• Multi-Channel Campaigns (Includes campaign creation, distributing campaigns, campaign interaction, tracking and analytics)
• Landing Page Management (A/B and multi-variate testing, templates, micro sites and WCM integration)
• Social Media Integration and Marketing (Social logins, social graph integration, etc.)
• Social Media Monitoring and Intelligence (Data collection, procession, analysis and presentation)

For each of these broad categories, we will further drill down and provide detailed evaluations.

As with our other research streams, we have categorized the marketplace based on the current state of tools and their focus areas. This categorization will evolve over time but for now, we will have the following categories:

• Major Suites and Platforms
• Minor Suites
• Lead Management focused tools
• Campaign focused tools
• Social Media Monitoring and Intelligence tools
• Landing Page and Optimization oriented tools

For the first version of the report, here's a tentative list of vendors we plan to cover:

• Adobe
• Aprimo
• Attensity
• Attentio
• Collective Intellect
• CrowdFactory
• Eloqua
• ExactTarget
• IBM
• Leads360
• Lithium
• Manticore
• Market2Lead
• MarketBright
• Marketo
• Neolane
• Nielsen
• Pardot
• Radian6 / SFDC
• SDL-Alterian
• SilverPop
• Sprinklr
• Sysomos
• Visible Technologies
• Wildfire

As I said, this is all tentative right now and subject to change. If you are a user of any of these or other similar tools, we'd love to chat with you. I'd also welcome your feedback about our categorization, or if there's anything we should add to the evaluations. Please email me, leave a comment below, or tweet me.

The latest victim in the Web Content & Experience Management (WCXM) space is Refresh Software, who finally called it quits in recent months after a long period of, well, lack of refreshment.

Early in the last decade, Refresh Software made the now familiar transformation from web consulting company to software vendor, replete with outside funding and an imported "professional" CEO.

Refresh took a somewhat novel and useful approach to web content management: you could retrofit their content database and simple entry forms behind a pre-existing website or web application. This obviated the need to replace your entire front end when you implemented a CMS-based back end.

At a time when marketing managers were beginning to assume control of web publishing operations, few customers took to this approach -- Refresh became an explicitly techie sale -- but some enterprises saw value in such a highly decoupled architecture. Refresh customers who clearly understood what they were buying into seemed quite happy with the technology.

Alas, somehow Refresh lost their way. I can't offer any special inside dope on the company, but based on watching them in the marketplace over the years, I suspect their demise can be traced to three fundamental problems:

1. Lack of implementation partners
   Small- to mid-sized vendors can make a go of it with their own professional services consulting groups in lieu of a channel approach (Ektron is doing this now), but in the event, they need to make a real commitment there, since consulting is not a simple business to manage. Refresh never seemed to build up either a broad consulting channel or deep internal bench.
2. Permanent bootstrap mode
   Although Refresh did acquire some outside funding, it continued to stay in loosely organized, start-up mode at a time when competitors were maturing their operations significantly. For example, product engineers at Refresh often did double-duty as support techs -- which was great for customers, sometimes -- but also meant that at other times both product release cycles and customer support could suffer.
3. Meandering roadmap
   This was the killer, I suspect. Refresh initially committed to its simple, page-oriented approach -- pointing out correctly that not all web publishers need or could handle the overhead of highly structured, reuse-oriented systems. The company then did a complete about-face and wandered into the realm of "component document management," an area their technology (and likely most of their customers) were quite unsuited to support.

For better or worse, it takes more than good technology to succeed as a vendor. In fact, many outwardly successful WCXM vendors have sold rather poor technology (c.f., HP/Autonomy/Interwoven TeamSite). Operational acumen clearly matters, but so does building a sustainable community around any offering.

This is yet another reason why we pay increasing attention "vendor intangibles" in our comparative product evaluations, and you should too.

Best wishes to the former Refreshians as they move on to other firms.

Yet I remain a bit puzzled as to why the service has gone live at all, since it's clearly far from complete, usable, or reliable. The fact that it took four weeks to build what is essentially a simple web app is all well and good (even though it repeatedly delivered error pages in my test). But the real value that in this sort of application should derive from quality of the information it delivers. Currently the quality of that information is dismal.

From what I can gather 250 firms submitted information on a total of 1500 services they could deliver to the public sector, and all of them have gotten duly listed on the site.

That was the first red flag, and indeed further investigation reveals that as of now not one of those services has been tested or certified in any way at all; the claims have just been taken as verbatim. Even so, Cloudstore allows you to circumvent thorough tendering processes through the Official Journal of the European Community (OJEC), yet cannnot guarantee whatsoever the quality or fit of the services it promotes. 

I found:

• Services offered that run on products that do not meet Government standards
• A dominance of the usual major IT suppliers, claiming to offer almost anything (regardless of actual expertise)
• Many well known and experienced government IT suppliers missing
• Currently no details on what future accreditation will actually mean or demand of a supplier or service

This last point in particular concerns me deeply. Surely it seems fair to assume that "accredited" services and suppliers will have had their organization vetted, that they are viable and solvent, that they have experienced and reliable products and support, and that they meet technical standards.  Buyers will also want a solid understanding of these criteria and how they were met. Surely this is the basic due diligence that any buyer has to undertake? Yet I found no indication here of what accredited status will mean, how it will be administered, and how it will be checked and maintained.

I had high hopes for this system. Perhaps it was just a really bad idea to launch it now, long before the real work has been done.  To my mind this store should not have gone live until all the services and suppliers had been thoroughly vetted and assessed. Expert reviews of the remaining suppliers and further research of the market to ensure that a wide array of viable options is actually represented (rather than just those that have volunteered themselves) also seems necessary.

Until that time, this has little more value than a search on Google or Craigslist, and comes with potentially more risk of those, since it intends to help you shortcut necessary selection steps.

I'm all for speeding up and removing unnecessary bureaucracy from the procurement process, which is actually a one focus area of our business; but to repeat, the web application itself is not the important thing here. You can label it "cloud" and get more buzz, but at the end of the day it's the quality and veracity of the information delivered that matters most.  That information is nowhere near ready for consumption right now.

Yesterday we published an updated "Cross Check" marketplace analysis, which identifies potential problems and opportunities for all of the WCXM vendors we evaluate. The two charts below are republished from that briefing.

Rise of the Planet of the Platforms

We've found it useful to organize vendors primarily according to complexity and power. Specifically, we make a distinction between "platforms" and "products." See this advisory briefing for more background on this division.

If there is one overall trend we see right now, it's the growing "platformization" of WCXM systems. Some organic customers forces are driving this, including greater centralization of (more CMS-savvy) web teams, along with greater website complexity more generally. But vendors, too, are pushing harder to go upmarket, filling a vacuum left by the many fading players in this space. (For a deeper critique of each major vendor, consult the individual product chapters in our full WCXM evaluation research.)

About Cross Checks

These charts represent four key dimensions -- Vendor Size, Focus on WCXM, Vendor Evolution, and Product Development -- that supplement functional and cost analyses in any major procurement decision. In committing to a purchase, you are also committing to a short-term implementation — and a long-term relationship. There are always risks in both timeframes.

As always there's no "right" or "magic" or "leader" location. Buyers with strong internal IT processes and a predilection for early adoption may favor a vendor undertaking fundamental changes, on the grounds that they may be able to influence roadmaps and new technology, as well as "leapfrog" competitors that are stuck with older tools and approaches. Other customers may prefer a WCM supplier evolving at a more moderate pace, while still others prefer a very conservative approach.

Each of you will rate the importance of these dimensions differently and we encourage you to make use of these visualizations in the broader context of other considerations in your selection process.

Platform-oriented WCXM Vendors

Fig 1. RSG Cross-Check for Platform-oriented WCXM Vendors
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Product-oriented WCM Vendors

Fig 2. RSG Cross-Check for Product-oriented WCXM Vendors
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To understand why we placed particular vendors in specific places on the chart, Web CMS research subscribers can download our 8-page background briefing.

His key areas of focus at RSG will be Web Content Management and Search technologies, with a watching brief on other areas such as social and the semantic web.  Those who have seen Matt speak at conferences in the past will know that he explains highly complex technical issues in a down-to-earth, clear-cut, and humorous way.

With our new hires, we hope to be able to better support our growing ranks of advisory service customers, both in the US, Europe, and wherever you may be located.