Seth Gottlieb News & Articles

Dissatisfaction is spreading through the world of web content management like an epidemic, and while it’s easiest to pass the blame off on the tools you use, chances are that good ol’ fashioned human failures are the actual culprit. In fact, changing content management platforms could be the most detrimental thing you do for your company this year.

Ever wonder how secure your open source web application really is? Security company Qualys has a tool called BlindElephant that can tell you, and they have run some tests.

Regardless of whether you're implementing a Web CMS, iterating a web application or building a new web platform from scratch your technical project environment is probably fairly chaotic -- most are. Here are 8 management tips for balancing the oft dueling needs of forward progress and longer term software sanity.

If you followed the advice from the first two articles in this series (How to build a short list and Developing scenarios), you should have a good idea of what you are looking for and with what products you might find some content management system bliss. This next article provides guidance on how you can start evaluating actual products against your defined requirements.

In my last article, I described how to avoid the analysis-paralysis trap and quickly make your way to a short list of content management software options. If you missed that article, check out Selecting a CMS: How to Build a Short List.  If you followed the recommended approach, you should have a good idea of your high-level vision (what type of website you need to manage), your financial and technical constraints and few promising products to look at.

In this article I describe how to define some practical usage scenarios which you will use to shape the product evaluation process.

It is easy to see why most companies struggle with the CMS selection process. The market is flooded with hundreds of products and there does not appear to be a "safe", market-leading choice.

Ultimately, you want to select a content management system that supports your requirements and that your users will find usable.  But evaluating CMS software for functionality and usability takes time.  You don't want to waste your time getting intimate with the wrong products, yet battling your way to a reasonable short list is easier said than done. There are some shortcuts, here's how to get started.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we cover tons of solutions every day. In fact, Seth Gottlieb, founder of Content Here says there are somewhere between 1,700 and 2,000 products out there that call themselves content management systems, so options certainly aren’t the problem. But how exactly to select one? There’s a pressing issue.

Today’s guidance comes directly from Gottlieb, who today held a workshop at this year’s Gilbane San Francisco conference in hopes to teach us all exactly how to find our perfect Web CMS match. And trust us, it’s not as scary of a process as it may seem. Rather than provide ultimate or magic answers, Gottlieb's refreshing words heavily focused on getting back to the basics.

Researching and selecting a web content management system is often an arduous process. On the outset, few organizations realize what they are getting into. And most team reps and decision makers have other daily responsibilities that compete for their attention. It's not surprising that simple looking decision making tools suddenly become attractive.

Once the requirements collection and product evaluation phases are complete, the most difficult part of a CMS selection process starts. In this phase the group must take all the information that was gathered and meaningfully use it to make an accurate decision. With project fatigue setting in, this is where things often go wrong.

Content Here, an analyst and consulting firm that focuses on content management technologies has published a report entitled Open Source Web Content Management in Java.

The report provides detailed reviews of seven software solutions including Alfresco, Apache Lenya, Daisy CMS, Hippo CMS, Jahia, Magnolia, and OpenCms. In addition, the report discusses the web content management marketplace in general and how open source solutions fit into this market.

This report is great because it provides companies with a review of open source solutions similar to the reports provided by CMS Watch, Gartner and Forrester on proprietary content management solutions.

At the outset, building a Web Content Management System from scratch can seem like a good idea. And frankly, for some of us techy types, building such a thing can sound like a lot of fun as well.

After all, commercial content management systems are expensive and require a lot work to learn, configure and deploy. Furthermore, if an open source CMS is going to be considered, and you expect to have to learn and modify the code-base, why not just build one from the ground up?