Hosted Cms News & Articles

In the spirit of this month’s editorial theme on all things cloud, I thought I’d ponder about cloud/SaaS web content management on the premise that SaaS Web CMS cannot save the world or cure your WCM illness, despite the much-spread hype you may hear in the marketplace generated by vendors. There’s no perfect storm for cloud WCM.

When I saw the headline of the Forrester article proclaiming the death of the enterprise CMS suite, I couldn't help but both be pleased with myself, and feel a little sorry for the analysts. After all, I scooped them and proclaimed the exact same thing a little more than three weeks before.

Countless industry studies have been published confirming something many of us already know -- content volume and diversity are increasing rapidly in organizations of all sizes. This rapid expansion along all dimensions is driving enterprises to adopt content management solutions to gain better control and visibility of their information. Increasingly, many of these organizations are selecting cloud-based platforms to flexibly handle content growth without the complexities of managing a highly available environment. Microsoft hopes that at least a portion of this growing market will select Azure to power their deployments. Will they?

This may be old news to some of you, but the big boys are dying a slow and painful death. CMS vendors are an endangered species as OpenText (formally Vignette) , Autonomy (formally Interwoven) and, to a lesser extent, Documentum are experiencing the effects of a disruption of their marketplace. As a result, there are some big existential questions for them.

Today the news dropped that San Francisco-based SaaS Web content management vendor, Clickability, which had previous raised more than US$ 15 million in backing, was purchased by Limelight Networks for US$ 10 million. Ouch. 

Amazon's stability troubles may be dominating the headlines, but that's not stopping the momentum of cloud-based offerings. EPiServer (news, site) is the latest to fall in line offering a "Platform-as-a-Service" version of its content management system.

Has it really been two months since QuarkXPress 9 came out? You know what they say, one good desktop product deserves a server version. Or something like that. Nerdy cliches aside, Quark (news, site) is back in the news with the release of QuarkXPress Server 9.

The DAM Lowdown was off last week, but that didn’t stop the DAM news. This week we have highlights from NAB 2011, another acquisition by KIT Digital, product and people updates from ADS, a new iPad app for Hollywood production and more Quick Hits.

Vasont ST (news, site) launches this week with new mobile-focused features for the XML-based content management system.

Publishing content management provider Really Strategies (news, site) has announced the availability of RSuite Cloud, a cloud-based print, web and eBook production solution that supports 70 languages. The product capitalizes on three of what are expected to be the biggest technology trends of 2011: Cloud computing, content management and globalization.

Halogy's CMS (news, site) now offers a version for download to go with its free SaaS edition.

YikeSite, a SaaS Web CMS service we wrote about in 2007, has some recent upgrades to its CMS services including a new iPhone app, developer API and an enhanced reseller offering.

Almost exactly a year ago LinearCube (news, site) launched its Alfresco-based document management solution for the SMB market. Recently it has extended that software with the launch of ContentCube Dedicated (CCD), which comes enhanced software and customizable features for large businesses and service providers.

OmniUpdate (news, site) -- the makers of the OU Campus Web CMS primarily targeted at the higher education market -- released version 9.3. The highlight of which is the ability to publish content to Twitter.