Sitecore collared some key customers over the holidays and badgered them for feedback about their short-term plans, hopes, and dreams for their content systems. Reports from the field identified three broad trends for Web CMS for 2008, and Sitecore have been so good as to share their findings with us.The trends are the "integration of Web CMS into the enterprise," "adoption of mobile computing," and "the growth of .NET Framework." Sitecore notes that while these trends were already apparent in 2007, they will have a more noticeable effect on the market in 2008.
Integration of Web CMS into the Enterprise
Of 44 Sitecore customers, all had already integrated search, and half had integrated CRM with their Web CMS. Other examples of integration between the website platform and enterprise systems included video management, e-commerce, and ad serving. Sitecore's plans for 2008 include "more scalable rich features that are easily and seamlessly integrated into the enterprise's CMS and .NET framework." Watch this space.
.Net in the Enterprise
"By building user experience, communications and workflow advances, and including capabilities to support standards-based Web services, the framework is better able to scale to large enterprises and integrate advanced Web CMS capabilities. The greater adoption of .NET helped Sitecore recently win customers such as the New Orleans Saints, Atlanta Falcons, and Microsoft in 2007.".Net is gonna get yet bigger in the enterprise, says Sitecore, and they're on board for the ride.
Mobile Computing
"Phones and laptops have changed the way that people use and interact with the Web and have allowed them to see content whenever and however they are connected."Really? Are you serious? Also, I heard this one time that bears crap in the woods. But for a concrete example of how Sitecore's Web CMS technology works with mobile, multi-channel content delivery, go have a look at the Atlanta Falcons website, which is Sitecore-built and boasts a ton of mobile, social, and Web 2.0 features. Of course to see these features in action you're going to have to sign up. Which would make you sort-of a Falcons fan. Whether its really worth it, only you can decide."Sitecore is seeing a big change with website integration and scalability," said Darren Guarnaccia, VP Product Marketing. "We've learned from customer surveys and our own research that a very large number of our new customers and industry RFP's have as a requirement that all their content on their websites be accessible by mobile devices. Now, more than ever, businesses and web developers alike are looking to better leverage their marketing and branding efforts through their websites and Sitecore will continue to innovate and provide the most advanced Web CMS products that enable enterprises to achieve these key goals."Regarding content management as a whole, there's nothing in any of this that we didn't already know. But perhaps the identified trends give us an idea of what Sitecore has up its sleeve for the coming months. If so, we can look forward to more innovation from the company in mobile and multi-channel content management and in various aspects of Web CMS integration with enterprise systems. Or maybe they'll surprise us, and focus on completely different avenues. Either way is good Sitecore. Keep it coming.
About the Author
John Conroy is a PhD candidate at the National University of Ireland Galway where he hacks with python and researches information retrieval and data mining, social graphs and interaction graphs. Connect with John Conroy:
