Content Management Matters ™

Once upon a time personalization was a magic and wonderful word. The promises came and went, largely unfulfilled. That's not to say that the technology didn't work. It did. Nor is it to say that the basic ideas were bad. They weren't. The problems by and large were related to how people attempted to use the stuff and the complexities and costs related to integrating it.

Amazon and others have continued to pursue the grail, if in modest strokes. Now were seeing web content management vendors investing in this direction. I say "grand!" If it's done simply and with out too much ambition, personalization can be a great tool.

RedDot, Open Text's Web solutions arm, has announced new integration features for Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. The new package is called "MOSS 2007 Document Management Integration", and focuses on ... let me check my notes here... document management in Microsoft's Billion Dollar baby.

More specifically, RedDot's new product aims to 'Expand the web visibility of "...SharePoint Document Libraries Securely to ... Online Media."
If we were in sarcastic mood, we could point out that we know of another product which will do exactly that, and do it pretty well, and that other magical tool is called... SharePoint. Of course that would be trite and mean, and not like us at all.

While the term Web 2.0 may be getting a little long in the tooth, the associated concepts and functionality that users have become accustomed to are here to stay. However, the idea of installing, configuring and maintaining a separate piece of software to enable Web 2.0 capabilities is a nightmare for organizations of any size.

Open Text answers questions about just what would be done with RedDot, which was acquired as part of the Hummingbird acquisition, by using RedDot CMS to enable a personalized web experience for the Yorkshire Tourist Board.

Open Text, the ECM solutions provider (and contender for world domination), announces that RedDot's most current content management and delivery software are available, in the form of RedDot CMS 7.5 and RedDot LiveServer 3.5. Post acquisition, RedDot functions as the Open Text Web Solutions Group.

Choices, choices, choices... but no big players yet. That's the message for European CMS technology buyers, according to the European edition of the CMS Report by CMS Watch, released today. "Standard", and "Enterprise" -- for large multi-site projects -- editions are available.