Product Briefing: CommonSpot 4.0 Web Content Management

If you are a fan of ColdFusion, or are open to considering it for your Web Content Management (CMS) platform, you should definitely take a close look at the latest release of PaperThin’s CommonSpot Content Server.

In a recent interview with Todd Peters, PaperThin’s President, CMSwire discussed the key themes of the CommonSpot 4.0 release, trends in the content management market place, and topics such as ColdFusion application server performance.

With the 4.0 release of CommonSpot, PaperThin has stuck to its roots. They have demonstrated both a commitment to practical feature development and the sensitivity to prioritize customer-driven requirements.

Introducing PaperThin
Massachusetts based PaperThin, Inc. is a mid-market web content management vendor, delivering a single ColdFusion-based Web CMS product, CommonSpot Content Server. In operation for over 11 years, the company delivered the first version of CommonSpot in 1998.

CEO Todd Peters is a focused and amicable technologist who started down the CMS road developing document and information management and dissemination solutions for AT&T in the early 1990’s. Todd’s goal for the CommonSpot product is to deliver the most feature-rich Web CMS product in the middle market, combining ease of use, features, and rapid time-to-deployment.

Web CMS and Web CMS, What’s CommonSpot?
I have worked fairly extensively with CommonSpot and a number of other Web CMS products. I’ve found that each product is instilled with an unshakable trace of its roots. What this means is that the software will probably always function best in an environment that closely matches the one for which it was originally developed. In the case of CommonSpot, the software was developed as a mid-market CMS solution, excellent for small to mid-size organizations, or as a specific component of a large organization’s overall CMS strategy.

CommonSpot is not an enterprise content management solution. It is focused specifically on low to medium volume Web publishing and is most appropriate for small/medium business or as a large organization’s department-level solution.

CommonSpot is a feature rich Web CMS. PaperThin is a company that stays tuned to the needs of their customers. In my opinion, these are the product’s primary strengths.

As an integration and/or extensibility platform, CommonSpot is improving, but has a ways to go. It was not designed for this any more than it was designed for high volume publishing. For the mean time, these areas are best left to other vendors.

Generally speaking, the product is easy to use. It installs quickly, has an intuitive interface for content authors, and has a less intuitive, but adequate interface for site administrators.

Key features such as templating and workflow are designed in a simple and adequate way. Template inheritance is particularly powerful. And when combined with content security and metadata capabilities these features allow for easy standardization of both presentation and metadata practices.

Customization of the product and integration of custom software is flexible and straight forward, but requires knowledge of ColdFusion. A broad core API is not part of the current release, but is something we expect to evolve as CommonSpot moves towards a ColdFusion Component architecture and supports more and more web services interactions.

CommonSpot does support the creation of multi-language sites, but does not provided localized versions of the software and has not spent a lot of time developing multi-lingual site support. The interface for contributors/administrators is currently only offered in English.

CommonSpot is 100% ColdFusion and therefore may be deployed on any number of ColdFusion/J2EE platforms including JRun, BEA, and WebSphere. As a ColdFusion application, the software will scale best in a WebSphere/Linux configuration.

What’s New and What’s not?
When asked what the key themes of the 4.0 release were, Todd Peters said “Improved scalability, usability, and content reuse”.

Product Briefing: CommonSpot 4.0 Web Content Management

If you are a fan of ColdFusion, or are open to considering it for your Web Content Management (CMS) platform, you should definitely take a close look at the latest release of PaperThin’s CommonSpot Content Server.\n\nIn a recent interview with Todd Peters, PaperThin’s President, CMSwire discussed the key themes of the CommonSpot 4.0 release, trends in the content management market place, and topics such as ColdFusion application server performance. \n\nWith the 4.0 release of CommonSpot, PaperThin has stuck to its roots. They have demonstrated both a commitment to practical feature development and the sensitivity to prioritize customer-driven requirements.\n

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