Lots of subtle and not-so-subtle changes to report

Major forces are buffeting the Web Content & Experience Management (WCM) marketplace, and key vendors and open source players are tacking in different directions in response. Some are expanding the scope of functionality, others are narrowing their focus, while others simply sail on like it's still the good old days.

As the Web CMS marketplace pendulum has swung from content management to experience management over the past few years, we've seen a greater emphasis on "coupled" architectures. That's not always a good thing

As we release version 21.4 of our Web Content and Experience Management (WCXM) research, I wanted to give you a quick rundown of the latest developments of seven vendors we included in this update

As much any of the other five continents where we have research customers, we see that Europe is particularly regionally inclined: small vendors flourish in their local markets, often keeping out larger global competitors. But perhaps moreso than the rest of western Europe (UK excluded), out of DACH has come come of the largest technology powerhouses in content management, from the likes of SAP and CoreMedia to Day (since acquired by Adobe) and e-Spirit, to open source projects such as Magnolia, OpenCMS, and Typo3

CoreMedia's recent announcement that are targeting Media and Entertainment customers with set of specific -- albeit somewhat vague -- new functionalities for that segment raises an interesting question

I enjoyed an excellent day in Oxford last week speaking (and listening to the other speakers) at a CMS Expert Group round table event. Many topics of interest emerged, but the one that underlay several discussions -- and is also close to my heart -- was, "When is a Web Content Management project not a Web Content Management project?"

This month's update to our Web CMS Report evaluations offers the latest critiques of nine web content management vendors:

If you're running a SAP NetWeaver Portal -- presumably since you've bought into SAPs infrastructure -- you may have discovered it's not the most ideal of platforms to actually publish content on

Last month we updated several WCM vendor evaluations, including

At first I was hesitant to write a critique of the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM. They're a worthy competitor, we could learn from them about the value of high-level summaries, and the MQ makes an easy target

At CMS Watch we evaluate an awful lot of products, and making sense of all this research can be a challenge.

Back in April I commented on incompatibilities with various Web CMS tool interfaces and IE7 in Microsoft Vista. Now, 4 months later I am busy researching the upcoming 12th edition of the Web CMS Report, and still many vendors (e.g.,

While the CoreMedia corporate website still mentions CMS, it seems like the longtime German content management vendor is more focused on digital rights management (DRM) these days.

The German government has launched the first site managed by a new Web content management system, Government Site Builder, which was built by a local integrator, Materna, on top of a product from German CMS vendor CoreMedia.