It is often said that the best sales force a company has are satisfied customers. It is clearly not said often enough of Open Text, after swallowing 3 different Web CMS vendors (Obtree, Gauss, and RedDot) in recent years.

My experience with Obtree/Gauss CMS clients in Europe since the beginning of 2007 is that the level of clarity in the communications from Open Text about the future of what had been its main WCM products leaves a great deal to be desired. The Obtree 1Q07 roadmap indicated that there would be a release of Version 10 by the end of 2007, but a recent webcast to customers in the UK made no mention of Version 10, and indeed got no further than information about the imminent release of 9.8. Now I fully appreciate that roadmaps are always speculative, but a change of plan on this scale is surely worthy of a comment. The presenter of the webcast committed Open Text to supporting Obtree until 2012, but just what is meant by "support" remained completely unclear.

I'd be less worried if I had not had to cope with Open Text promising a major UK client of mine in 2003 that the integration of the then recently acquired Gauss and Obtree products would be straightforward (it wasn't). Migrating Obtree and Gauss to RedDot seems likely more a forklift upgrade.

The Open Text website says very little about these issues. The key document is a letter from RedDot President Daniel Kraft which contains very little useful information and is not even dated. If you then search for "Obtree", you get nine documents all with 1% relevance. If you search for "Gauss", you find that the first ten results all have a 98% relevance but refer (as do a great many more) to the acquisition.

(It is of note that Open Text does not actually indicate the number of results from a search, which is very poor practice. All you can do is click to the next ten. What impression does that give prospective customers?)

Obtree and Gauss customers have three options. The first is to stay with the current Web CMS platform and hope that there is a migration path (software and content) to RedDot sooner rather than later. The second is to move to RedDot as soon as possible, but that is not trivial and may not meet long-term requirements. The third is to specify and select a CMS from another vendor.

The options become harder to assess when Open Text seems capable only of indicating that they will support Obtree and Gauss "for the foreseeable future." Not very helpful. The issue is not just the Obtree roadmap, but what the integration/migration strategy with RedDot is going to be. Either Open Text doesn't know or isn't sharing. Either way, it's not working for some wary European customers.