Vendors are especially excited, such that Product X is no longer a WCM offering but a "WEM Suite" now. But you should be forewarned that in their quest for improving presentation management, vendors are soft-pedaling many core CMS concepts which haven't really seen a lot of innovation in recent times, and this, too, could impact your website visitor experience.

The services that make up the "E" part have been around for a long time, including: analytics, multi-variate testing, landing page management, CRM integration, personalization, template management, social functionality, and so on.  So, we are witnessing a natural progression and not something drastically new. The big difference now is that -- while these features tended to come separately in the past -- the trend now is to more tightly integrate them with traditional WCM services.  In many cases, these additional features are natively provided by WCM vendors themselves as part of a larger package.

You don't have to look far to find examples. Clickability, one of the hosted WCM vendors that we cover in our WCM evaluation research, recently announced a new module called Website Marketing Accelerator (WMA).  It's targeted at B2B marketers, enabling them to focus more on visitor segmentation and targeting. Other vendors such as IBM, Day, Fatwire, Open Text-Vignette, Autonomy-Interwoven, SDL, Sitecore, Alterian, EPiServer, et. al., have also been promoting their so-called WEM capabilities rather than core content management functionality. Some of them have gone as far as changing their product names.

You can understand this new emphasis because in many scenarios, content managers want to manage the consumption and interaction experience -- and not just the production process. Also, experience management includes the sexy stuff: personalization, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), Social applications, User Generated Content (UGC), and other Web 2.0 stuff, while core content management services entail less fancier features, such as authoring, workflow, library services, and publishing.

If you are new to Web Content Management, don't assume that vendors and consultants have figured the basic stuff out. In fact, as an industry we have not really solved some fundamental content production problems:

• Online authoring for most people, most of the time, is still a buggy and sometimes painful process
• It is still difficult for business users to create and participate in workflows
• Publishing from one environment to another still remains one of the most trickiest aspect to master
• Caching of web content remains a black art
• Issues related to standards and formats still plague the industry; You don't know if you'd be able to watch your home videos in 5 years time or not or whether the fonts and styles as you know them today will exist or not
• Many more challenges of content production, such as those related to multi-site management, content reuse, deployment, and so forth still remain tauntingly difficult

Don't get me wrong. It's important to manage visitor interaction, and often the best people to do this are content contributors and publishers. But you should know three things:

1. In the early days of WCM, systems typically followed the current all-bundled-in-one-system approach, and the long-term results were not always positive: reduced capabilities at system edges and and architectural inflexibility led to various knots that were difficult to untie.
2. Your WCM vendor may not be the right supplier for the varied services they are peddling today. Template management, native to your WCM tool? That's a good candidate. Blogs and wikis? Maybe. Testing and analytics? Probably not.
3. Above all, good content lies at the heart of good services and a constructive customer experience.

Vendors differ markedly in how they approach the "E" part. The pros and cons of your various choices constitute a large topic in itself, something that we cover in detail in our online Fundamentals of Web Content Management Technology course as well as our WCM evaluation research. So, call it WCM or WEM. The acronyms don't matter too much. Just remember: there is no point in having a great website front-end with content that's stale or fails to engage users in its own right. Get the production part down, or your visitors won't stick.

Initially, vendors were skeptical about providing information for a vendor neutral, independent analyst operation. Things have changed over the years, primarily because buyers like you have come to trust our evaluations as a complete and objective resource. The vendors are now more forthcoming with access to customers and solutions. It's made our job a lot easier, and it has also contributed to making the research more complete.

This is one of the big reasons I'm really pleased with the 5th edition we released earlier this month. It's been rounded out by lots of input from practitioners who are putting these solutions through their paces every day in large and small deployments and for both simple and complex analytics scenarios. My updates this year were also informed by my colleagues at Semphonic, who spend a lot of time "hands on" with Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrics, Google Analytics, Yahoo! Analytics and Unica, and much of my own vendor selection work.

While we've seen change in the market over the last year, notably the acquisition of Omniture and Coremetrics, I don't think of this as consolidation. I think of this as part of a continuum in the evolution of analytics that was started when Google acquired Urchin, and continued with Yahoo's acquisition of IndexTools.  Specifically, these moves represent large, well-funded companies purchase analytics because of their perception that analytics can help them add value to their existing offerings and create upsell opportunities within their existing client base.

What I find interesting and perhaps more challenging from a consumer perspective, is that the base line functionality of these tools can no longer be taken in a vacuum, but has to be considered in context with the influence and direction of the larger company. So, the question you face in the future may go something like this: "I like Coremetrics functionality but I also like the idea of being able to embed Omniture tags in our Adobe Creative Suite content. What's the trade off if I go with one instead of the other?"

Trade offs in functionality and price already exist today. What I see frequently is that tool selection often comes down to nuanced differences in functionality and price. Sure, it sounds clever to say "all analytics tools are basically the same" or "you can get 80% of what you need from Google Analytics." But if you look really closely at the solutions you'll find small but important differences...differences that translate into solution acceptance or rejection by your user base (such as ease of use), or complete data analysis (such as ease of analytics data export).  

I think you'll find our evaluations helpful as you begin to explore those trade-offs.

So here's a tip. Your project team can mitigate the risk of alienating end-users by separating notions of "education" and "training." Training is something that cannot take place until a system is ready to use – usually later in the project. "Education" should begin as early as possible, and conducted in parallel with or before a technology implementation. 

Future users of any new system will almost always need education on key concepts.  In a Web CMS context, for example, key concepts would include everything from the basic, "what is content?" and "what are templates?" to explaining metadata and the impact it has on where and when content appears on the site.  Many of you reading this may think that everyone knows these basics, but trust me, they do not.

Alan and I recently helped a client create an education program for a major web content management overhaul being conducted in conjunction with a major front-end redesign.   This project marked a fundamental change in the way this enterprise manages and publishes content. Like many major CMS projects, business processes throughout the organization were substantially impacted. With more than a thousand stakeholders and users across seventy different countries, the project risked getting seen internally as simply just another in a long series of front-end redesigns that didn't really impact their daily work.

In a hands-on workshop that was purposefully a bit of fun (do NOT expect 1000+ people to get energized and ready to change over just another PowerPoint presentation), we were able to simulate how the current way of working was not sustainable, and showed the power of a new way of working. This education (remember: it wasn't system training) became the centerpiece of the company's global change management effort. Users were engaged with the project as the actual development was on-going. A rarity in these types of projects, we found end users thrilled to get included in the process, and excited to see how they could be a part of the company's fundamental change.

Projects that skimp on education and training usually do not launch smoothly. Users are inadequately prepared for their "new" jobs, and often take out their frustrations on the new system. Sometimes this leads to complete lack of adoption, or people using the system in ways it was never intended. While most project leaders tend to focus on budget and schedule, user satisfaction and their ability to adequately perform their jobs is the most meaningful metric for determining success or failure.

Focus your attention there.

To quote:

Workflow services can help minimize the cost and time required to coordinate common approval processes -- but only if the service does what you want it to do, and users don't "work around" the system....

Subscribers to our WCM and DAM research streams can download the workflow paper here.

From the introduction:

An important, yet rarely acknowledged architectural and product development shift has transpired over the past couple of years in the content technology marketplaces we cover. The debate has shifted from "Suite vs. Best of Breed" to "Platform vs. Product." This is partly a natural evolution in vendor marketing as technologies and marketplaces mature. Yet this shift also has profound implications for you, the customer. Beyond the normal criteria of cost, functional fit, and vendor fit, you need to assess a tool's position on the Platform-Product continuum against internal needs and capabilities.

The three-page briefing offers five specific steps your enterprise can take today to make sure you make the best technology choices for near-term and long-term success. To subscribe to our research so that you can receive advisories like this, contact us here.