Clickability, one of the hosted WCM vendors that we cover in our research announced a new module recently. The new module, called Website Marketing Accelerator (WMA) is targeted at B2B marketers and enables them to focus on their visitors. Although, the module is built on their existing WCM core product, it focuses on the delivery aspect of the content and enables your marketers to improve their sales process.

At a high level, it allows you to gather information – both anonymously as well as based on user input. The user input is collected over a time (this is called Progressive Profiling) and then you can rate or qualify a visitor based on some parameters. All this information which is collected over a period of time – starting from when the user was anonymous and then when the user registered and explicitly provided some information and finally based on a user’s behavior. Based on all this collected information, you can segment visitors and target content to them.

Not just Clickability but many other vendors, mostly of coupled WCM products such as IBM, Day, Fatwire, Open Text Vignette, Autonomy Interwoven and others have also been hard selling their presentation management capabilities rather than core content management capabilities.

So have WCM vendors given up on core content production issues or do they think there's no more scope for innovation there?

I can understand this trend  to some extent because in many scenarios, content managers may want to manage the consumption experience and not just the production process. Also, presentation management includes stuff that is sexy - Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), Social applications, User Generated Content (UGC) and the other so called web 2.0 stuff while the content management aspects includes less fancier features such as workflows, process management, publishing and library services. But in their quest for improving presentation management, the vendors seem to be ignoring these core CMS concepts which haven't really seen a lot of innovation in recent times. For example, it is still difficult for business users to create workflows and publishing from one environment to another still remains one of the most trickiest aspect to master in a WCM scenario.  Many more challenges of content production, such as those related to multi-site management, content reuse, deployment and so forth still remain unsolved.

As a user, you need to be aware that whether you call it experience or engagement or presentation, it is very different from content management. Its a large topic in itself, something that we cover in detail in our online Fundamentals of Web Content Management Technology course as well as research. However, just remember that whereas the former is about web site management or content consumption, the latter is about content production. There is no point in having a great front end with content that is stale and fails to engage users, which is what will happen if you chose to ignore one for the other!