Forrester News & Articles

 Web Content Management 1.0 is dead! So says Forrester Senior Analyst, Stephen Powers. There are few that would disagree with him -- I mean hey, there's like "2.0" all over the place these days. We need some for CMS too, right?

But more importantly, what's next? That is indeed the question.

And so when we saw Modera (news, site) take a £1.3 million (roughly US$ 1.8 mil.) investment and announce intentions to build its next generation web application framework, we were intrigued.

Have they got the secret sauce for generation deux-point-zero content management? We went to Siim Vips (great name!), CEO of Modera, for the answer to that question. Here's what we learned.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• More Adults Using Social Networking
• Conference Attendees Love To Tweet
• Google Extends OpenIDs to Google Apps
• Disney Deletes Alice in Wonderland Trailer Off YouTube

A positive customer experience is necessary for any organization. A key part of the customer experience is related to customer communications and how those communications are performed, in many cases as some sort of document output.

There are vendors out there that provide solutions to support the market for document output for customer communications management (DOCCM) and Forrester did an evaluation of 11 of those vendors to help you better understand their strengths and weaknesses. The report is called The Forrester Wave™: Document Output For Customer Communications Management, Q2 2009 and here's a look at what they found.

The eZ Conference and Awards kicked off today in Paris, France. The Norwegen open-sourcers are celebrating their 10th anniversary at this year's event, which for the first time, they are holding outside of Norway.

The choice of Paris is a nod to the growing importance of international markets in general and France in particular for eZ Systems (news, site). But that's not the only advantage of Paris. "Getting to Skien [Norway] is expensive and difficult. eZ has a lot of partners in France, and [the location] is good for them," says Bertrand Maugin of eZ France, and this year's event coordinator.

Today's program includes a late morning talk by Christian Lundvang of NXC on the CMIS Interface for eZ Publish, but for now it's the keynote address with Steve Powers, a senior Analyst with Forrester.

While some organizations are leveraging their Web Content Management (Web CMS) investments to create powerful, customer-centric web experiences, many are just barely scratching the surface.

Face it, you can probably do more with your website. Nearly all of us can. And if now is not the time to figure out how, we don't know when is.

Learn the Top Strategies

Siteworx has brought in Forrester's CMS all-star, Stephen Powers, to get down into the content management nuts and bolts. Together they're running a webinar this coming Monday the 22nd of June at 1 PM EDT (GMT-4).

The live event will share best practices and top strategies for using your Web CMS to reduce costs, improve efficiency and ultimately help grow your business.

Here's what on tap:

• Limitations of “first generation” Web CMS solutions and the transition to a customer experience-centric approach

• The “next generation” initiatives that are pushing the limits of legacy Web CMS capabilities, such as building communities, tailoring content for site visitors, distributing content across multiple channels and interacting with other enterprise applications

• Digital Asset Management (DAM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Document Output Management (DOM) systems

• An analysis of Forrester’s latest research report, “The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management for External Sites, Q2 2009.”

Sound like it's up your alley? We thought so. You can register here.

Obviously if you make the list of any analyst report -- at least in a good light -- you want the world to know. For FatWire (news, site), that analyst report comes in the form of the Forrester Wave for Web Content Management For External Sites, Q2 2009.

One of three leaders among ten web content management systems listed, FatWire received recognition for “business-user-oriented tools that enable not only the management of content, but targeted delivery, analysis, and optimization of content consumption as well.”

We won't go into the details of the report, we did that in our article SDL Tridion Named Leader in Web CMS for External Sites. Suffice it to say, this report is designed for enterprise level organizations who have money to spare (well, no one really has money to spare these days).

It's worth noting that FatWire is the smallest vendor to make the Forrester Wave list. Does that make it any less good? We doubt it, but sometimes the smaller vendors can give better support.

Get your copy of the Forrester Wave and get more detail on FatWire and the other leaders.

The Forrester Wave for Web Content Management For External Sites, Q2 2009 is out and there are 10 web content management vendors on the list that we all know and love well. SDL Tridion (news, site) took the top honors this time with Interwoven and FatWire close behind.

Why are these three vendors at the top and who else is on the list? Let's take a look.

You work in an organization where critical documents need to be securely stored yet easily available to those that need them. You also collaboration on those documents with other employees and/or partners who are a little farther away than in the next cubicle. That's your story. It's not unique -- it's becoming the norm.

We all need a sane way to manage, share and collaborate on these docs. But you, like the rest of us, are busy and you don't have the time to research each and every potential vendor solution.

What you want to know is what have others done and how it either succeeded or failed.

IntraLinks and Forrester are running a one hour online session entitled: New Trends in Ultra-Critical Document Sharing: Case Studies You Can Put to Use Today.

What should catch your eye is the case-studies bit.

It's about what organizations have faced, what they have done to resolve their issues and how it worked. These are real world case studies for managing partnerships, licensing, mergers and acquisitions, compliance and financial audits. And some of them come directly from mouths of people who work in these organizations.

You are on a need to know basis. And you need to know, now. Actually you probably needed to know yesterday, but we can't help you there.

Strike your fancy? Sign-up here. The event happens next Tues the 17th at 2pm EDT, 11am PDT.

It is the time of recession, they say. We wonder: do companies still invest money in Web Content Management?

Recent research indicates that WCM will live despite the economic downturn. Better yet, the CMS industry may even experience growth.

Continuing professional education can be one of the tools to make you more valuable and marketable in these uncertain economic times. Here’s an opportunity to learn more about SaaS Enterprise Content Management at a webinar hosted by SpringCM and Forrester Research.

Is Enterprise Content Management (ECM) an infrastructure platform or an application? What are the advantages and limitations of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in ECM? These questions and more are to be covered at this webinar.

Forrester kicks of 2009 with their review of the latest community platforms. The Forrester Wave™: Community Platforms, Q1 2009 is based on lab evaluations and interviews of nine community platform vendors. The top contenders are not really surprising, considering the market the review was based on.

Awareness knows you want to know more about leveraging Social Media Marketing. They also believe this type of marketing is your best strategy during a recession. And they are not alone.

Join Awareness and Forrester Vice President, Josh Bernoff on Wednesday December 10th at 2:00 PM EST for a webinar on “Why social media is your best marketing strategy in a recession! “

Social Media moves so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Here’s the week’s big news from the space, in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

• Kevin Rose says forget Web 2.0 or 3.0 — make your startup Web 2.5
• New MySpace Drag’n’Drop Interface
• Twitter a terrorist tool?
• Gilbane Conference on Social Media Meets CMS
• Forrester Report says Social Web Went Mainstream in ‘08

Kevin Rose says forget Web 2.0 or 3.0 — make your startup Web 2.5

When Digg supremo Kevin Rose isn’t playing the beer-swilling buffoon on DiggNation, he’s capable of putting in a shift as an extremely thoughtful business-evangelist type.

Never more so than in a recent Seesmic blog post , in which he takes a Paul Graham post on “Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy” and runs with it, concluding that once the boulder really got rolling, nearly all web 2.0 start-ups simply got lost in the noise and couldn’t gain any traction.

Digg, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and most of the services which we associate with the Web 2.0 tag all launched before that tag even made any sense. If you could apply the label “Web 2.0” to a new web startup, chances are it sank without trace (some obvious exceptions like Twitter aside).

Rose also talks about the early days of Digg (it’s only 4 years old??), recounting that it was a ‘scappy startup’, that he kept the day-job and pumped in a couple of thousand dollars here and a couple thousand there, and that he only went after Angel funding when he ran out of money. While doing things on the cheap may be anathema to the current brood of Web entrepeneurs, Rose reckons it’s by no means a bad thing for your startup if you can’t get money for your ‘back-of-the-envelope’ idea, and if you have to hold onto the day-job for a while.

Well, one analyst believes so. Those involved with the Web 2.0 industry are in trouble, according to Oliver Young, a Forrester Research analyst. He believes that the supply of Web 2.0 service applications is becoming too great, and that prices will decline as a result. As if that didn’t sound bad enough, pricing is one of the few aspects left to compete with.

So MOSS has been attacked for its web content management, lack of social networking features, its blogging and wiki functionality, and its fitness as a public facing Web CMS …hmmm not much else they can go after is there?

Oh yeah…be careful using it as an application development platform — it could wreak havoc in your organization.