The 11th edition of the "Web CMS Report" notes despite innovations in the marketplace and data suggesting otherwise, enterprise buyers and web content management vendors have a tough time incorporating Web 2.0 features and interfaces into their Web publishing make-up.CMS Watch principal Theresa Regli explains, "Web CMS vendors and their customers are really feeling their way to Web 2.0. Adding wiki, blog, and commenting facilities to a Web CMS tool does not guarantee that they will actually be used." It probably didn't take an expert to note what any IT knows: implementation is one hurdle to cross but maintenance is a whole 'nother story. After plugging in all the wikis, blogs and commenting doodads, who promotes, populates and administers over them? Even if a company succeeds in getting the Web 2.0 makeover, these technologies are extremely demanding time-wise: they require regular updates, highly targeted and consistent promotion, and anal-retentive administration. So for enterprises who developed stable business operations before the words "Web 2.0" ever slipped out of a hipster techie's mouth, this transition into wild, new and demanding media is akin to the moving of tectonic plates.CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne is quick to note that not everyone is suffering from upgrade laggage. "To be sure, some Web CMS vendors are executing well in some of these areas, and for Intranet scenarios in particular, it still makes sense to investigate consolidating your CMS and blog/wiki/forum environments," he explains. "However, many larger enterprises are electing to run separate web publishing and social networking infrastructures - with good reason."Indeed, the idea of taking the Web 2.0 implementation and management problem and putting them on a third-party back is extremely attractive. Whether it's a good solution is up to your company.Additional findings noted the following:* Enterprises who manage Web content in authoritative repositories behind corporate firewalls are nervous about investing in more Web CMS licensing and infrastructure to permit user-generated content on webservers. (Can you blame them?)* While blog, wiki and "presence" apps are a popular preference in Web CMS vendor packages, they're really only as good as band-aids, and cheap ones at that. Costlier best-of-breed competitor offerings make these inclusions scrawny in comparison.* Long-promised plans to build AJAX-powered interfaces among Web CMS vendors and open source communities are slowing, owing to difficulty in achieving cross-browser compatibility and consistently reliable performance. The 11th Edition is based on hundreds of interviews among web content management systems throughout the world, including detailed comparisons of vendors across a slew of key feature categories and evaluations of product suitability for a dozen universal CMS scenarios. The report was released yesterday morning by CMS Watch, a third-party analyst firm that evaluates content technologies and strategies for solutions buyers. A separate edition exists for vendors in the EU. To get ahold of the report or find out what else is going on in the CMS universe, visit CMS Watch.
About the Author
Angela Natividad is a compulsive communicator with thoughts on advertising, technology and life. Today she is VP-Marketing at hypios.com, in-house ad critic at Vanksen's Culture-Buzz.com, and co-hostess of AdVerve, a podcast about the culture of advertising.
