I want to revisit a few of the relevant questions that came via the webinar I did last week with Bryan House from Acquia on open source social publishing. We got to some of these on the call, but not all, and some of the more market-level questions seem worthy of sharing.
The webinar focused on both the coming together of social software and WCM, and on open source content management; these questions do too.
Q: Why is open source a disruptive force in the social web CMS space?
I started out my part of the preso talking a little bit about The 451 Group and our focus on disruption and innovation in IT. I mentioned this includes disruptive technologies, business models or larger market changes. Open source certainly fits into the disruptive business model category (though, I know, open source is not a business model). Open source can impact how technology in a particular sector is developed, distributed, procured, priced and supported. This isn’t new in content management; open source projects like Drupal have been around for quite some time.
But as more vendors are making a go of businesses tied to open source code in content management, the dynamic is changing. Open source is becoming more of a viable option in content management for even the largest of organizations and that is something that is only going to get more pronounced. And some of the open source projects (like Drupal and WordPress) seem to do a particularly noteworthy job of tying CMS and social software capabilities (of varying types) together. An interesting fact, I think, as it shows that when a community drives software development in this area, it combines these two areas together, an indication of what the larger market may want.
Q: Tools like Interwoven or Vignette are often described as more “enterprise-ready” than open source alternatives? How big is the delta? How should I evaluate whether particular differences are important?
In general, Interwoven, Vignette et al. have had more of a focus on online marketing capabilities the last couple of years and so have more in the way of content targeting, analytics, multivariate testing and so forth to offer. But I don’t think this is what people usually mean when they say a CMS is “enterprise ready” — I think that’s more to do with things like LDAP/AD support, migration and upgrade tools, platform/commercial database support and so on. The reality is that a lot of commercial open source content management vendors do offer these capabilities but often only in an “enterprise” edition of the code that may only be available under a commercial license. The key is just to ensure that a particular distribution meets your requirements under a license that works for your project.
Q: What questions should I ask a vendor to understand how tightly integrated their social software and web content management capabilities are?
There are several models here. Some vendors have built some social capabilities directly into their WCM products, basically with the idea that most of this as it relates to content sites isn’t too much more than defining a content type (e.g., blog, comment, profile) and its attributes. Some mostly support plugging in third-party blogs, forums etc. Others have separate social software modules. In some cases these have come via acquisitions and others have been built from scratch and so integration levels vary. Some share a content repository and some don’t. So there’s quite a bit of variety and, as usual, it’s mostly just important to make sure however a vendor has done it works for your project. If you just want to add support for comments to an existing content-heavy site, using the integrated features from a WCM vendor probably works fine. If it’s a full-blown, forum-heavy customer support site, more of a stand-alone product (whether from a WCM or social software vendor) might work best.
Q: How will the recent transactions (Vignette & Interwoven) impact this market?
The consolidation at the high end of the market has a number of vendors scrambling to get some advantage. Competitor FatWire Software has a formal “rescue” program and others are certainly having similar discussions with customers. Customers looking to migrate or to evaluate a wider field of WCM options may well look at open source, as the broader availability of products from commercial vendors makes this a more viable option.
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