Jahia News & Articles

Open source content management vendor Jahia (news, site) and Datamatics Global Services a developer of intelligent business applications, have announced that they are getting together to provide enterprise content management systems to international organizations.

The web content management space is not homogeneous. And while the recently released Open Source CMS Market Share Report clearly highlighted the ongoing dominance of LAMP-based content management systems -- these systems are not the only game in town.

In this article I look at brand leaders who have chosen to build their content management software on the Java or .NET technology stacks. Systems with strong brand awareness and adoption rates include Alfresco, Jahia, Liferay and OpenCMS on the Java side, and DotNetNuke and Umbraco from the .NET camp.

On Friday we announced the release of the second annual 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. The project was a collaboration with water & stone, an APAC-based interactive agency. The initial announcement addressed what the report covers, its purpose and some key highlights.

For the sake of disclosure, while I did look over the preliminary survey and advise on some tweaks, I otherwise wasn't involved in this report and am looking at this data with fresh eyes and no particular bias from the side of CMSWire.

Now let's take a look more in depth.

Jahia (news, site), an open source content management system vendor, is on a quest to further penetrate the U.S. market (among others) in addition to its French operations. The new global Jahia Business Partner Program gives partners more control and flexibility with free pre-sales support and various levels of certification, including those for VARs and SIs scenarios.

According to Jahia, they don’t want to compete with their partner network when it comes to CMS implementations. Hence, the “non-compete guarantee.” That means Jahia plans to refer almost all of the integration work to its partners -- around 70 of them in 15 countries around the globe. Some of Jahia’s partners are in the U.S., the market to which Jahia is paying more and more attention.

"Being open source and not competing with services partners is unique within the open source industry… We are focusing on software and its related support…," said Emmanuel Garcin, Jahia's VP and GM for North America.

While having an implementation partner network is a common approach in the industry, why not do that work in-house? Why not move toward a native Professional Services approach? Sure, it’s more costly and requires you to have, grow and nurture the in-house subject matter expertise. While it’s certainly not a deal-breaker in many CMS selection processes, different organizations may feel differently about partner vs. vendor implementations.

[Editor's Note: See our recently released report on the top 20 open source content management systems (including Jahia).]

Following on the heels of the 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, this year we collaborated with water&stone to produce an improved 2009 version. The report is an interesting study of 20 dominant systems in the market. It's really not about which CMS is best, nor about relative comparisons beyond brand strength, sentiment and adoption patterns. We're aware of this.

Traditional and Social Media Analysis

What the study did was sniff around the nooks and crannies of our increasingly electronic and publicly broadcast lives and endeavor to quantify the relative brand strengths, brand sentiments and adoption patterns for the top 20 most popular content management products. In addition, we ran a survey on CMSWire.com a little ways back. With this tool we were able to directly pose questions to our readership -- and more than 1200 of you took to the task (thank you!).

This year's analysis looked at Alfresco, CMS Made Simple, DotNetNuke, Drupal, e107, eZ Publish, Jahia, Joomla, Liferay, MODx, OpenCms, phpWebSite, Plone, SilverStripe, Textpattern, TikiWiki, Typo3, Umbraco and WordPress.

Key Conclusions: 3 Dominate, Many Are Vibrant

What jumped quickly out is that The Big Three -- Joomla, WordPress and Drupal -- led the survey set across a wide range of measures. However, the top slots are not static, Joomla has gained market share over Drupal, and WordPress with its hosted version has what looks like a smoother path to adoption.

The report identifies less obvious stars. Alfresco, a vendor focused on both document management and web content management, performed well across a number of categories, and led the Java-based open source CMS race over its nearest rival, Liferay. DotNetNuke led the .NET-based open source CMS category, though Umbraco is up and coming.

The report goes on to identify reasons why DotNetNuke's position may soon be changing. In addition to naming the market leaders, the study identifies projects whose market share and brand metrics indicate they are at risk or facing a closing window of opportunity. A metric we found of particular interest was the product evaluation rates versus the adoption rates.

The 90+ page report is available for free and includes profiles of each of the systems covered.

Many in the content management industry (and beyond) seem to be slightly obsessed with the buzz that the “cloud” is. The opinions can be quite polar, but for now we’ll concentrate on those embracing virtualization.

In today's interview, Emmanuel Garcin, VP and GM in North America for open source CMS provider Jahia (news, site), shared his thoughts about cloud trends and told us how Jahia is going about it with the newest release of Jahia Cloud.

Did you ever think Zipcars were a more flexible option than, say, Hertz? Jahia is transferring this principle to web content management (+/- one JVM).

The next wave of European content management vendors hitting the U.S. market is yet again upon us. This time, the ripples are coming from the open source Enterprise CMS vendor Jahia (news, site).

The vendor launched its U.S. mission two years ago, continuing it with today’s formalization of efforts by opening its North American HQ office in Washington, DC. Emmanuel Garcin, Jahia's VP, will serve as the GM for North America.

A little before that, a new R&D and Support office was opened in Montreal, Canada.

In the meantime, Jahia has also been shaking hands with integrators like Quoin, Sapient and Avantia, trying to cater to all its Java-devoted customers in and outside of the Americas.

These are some of the highlights of what Jahia’s been up to lately, in case you need a reminder:

• Extending U.S. reach via its partner Quoin
• Launching GPL Community Edition
• Working on multi-source content management with Content Bus
• Adding more enterprise features to the content integration software

With local as well as other European open source vendors (like Hippo and Nuxeo), it may get pretty crowded in the enterprise CMS U.S. market. Closed-source ECM vendors like IBM, EMC and Open Text are surely paying attention.

Jahia's (news, site) United Content Bus has been launched at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco, tying all of a company's content together via a single interface. 

Jahia (news, site) has upgraded the enterprise version of its enterprise content integration system to version six, with a new front end, improved editing, JBoss document management and improved portal features.

Jahia (news, site), an enterprise CMS vendor, is boosting its U.S. presence by tying up with a technology consulting firm Quoin (site) to help distribute Jahia's free community edition and paid-for enterprise CMS suite.

Another enterprise class content management system adopts open source GPL licensing. It is no surprise. A platform is only as good as its adopters, and offering an open source version in today's competitive CMS market is one path to deployment growth. Building a committed community of third party developers who daily deploy, interact and tinker with a CMS platform can only enhance both the feature offerings and sustainability of that platform.

If you are into BPM, and that’s more and more of you lately, Gartner — the heavyweight amongst the IT research giants — is running their Business Process Management Summit this February 26th through 28th in San Diego, California.

James Robertson of Aussie firm Step Two has published an article entitled Top 10 mistakes when selecting a CMS. His short take is that organizations make the selection process much harder than it needs to be. And we couldn’t agree more …that is, when they do actually take the time to think the details through.

Hot on the heels of Intel’s SuiteTwo announcement, Blogtronix has unveiled an update of their enterprise collaboration and communication platform. This release boasts expanded features for blogging, wikis, document management, extensive personal and corporate profiling, and social networking.