As a technology customer, sometimes you should worry less that a software vendor is blowing smoke, and perhaps a bit more that the vendor's consulting partners may be leading you down the garden path. Some consultants bank their entire job -- or even their whole career -- on a specific product, and will sometimes defend it to the last.

I was reminded of this recently when my colleague Alan pointed me to six year-old dust-up about Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS).

Here's the story. At the end of 2004 I received the following inquiry and published my reply in the (now defunct) "Ask Tony" area of the website.

I am looking for a CMS system that can replace MCMS 2002. The problem is migrating the data from MCMS 2002, such as the database schema, templates, etc. What's the best way to migrate?

Thank You.

MS SysAdmin

My answer:

I'm starting to get increasingly anxious inquiries from Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) customers about the future of the product. For the skinny on migration choices, I turned to an MCMS expert, Bill Schneider at Susquehanna Technologies. Here's what Bill says... [Discussion of migration options]

Daring to suggest that MCMS customers might have reservations about the product's future yielded predictable outbursts from Microsoft partners -- "FUD!" "Despicable!" -- including a letter to me in early 2005 that I ended up reprinting on our website. Note the consultant's references to inside sources in Redmond pointing to a happy future for MCMS.

Perhaps you know the rest of the story. No happy future. Microsoft effectively stopped selling MCMS in 2006 with the advent of SharePoint 2007 (a completely different codebase), and Redmond is in the process of winding down official support for it.

There's another lesson here about technology viability and stability. We've said it before, but it bears repeating. Big vendors are more likely to kill products than small vendors. To protect yourself, you need to watch what the vendor does, and not what its consulting partners say.

To be fair, sometimes analysts kill content too, which we did with the Ask Tony column. But there's no Wayback Machine for your aging software...