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Event News: FOWA Summer Sale, Stack Overflow Dev Days Selling out & your chance to speak on the FOWD Tour
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Kevin Rose: How to Promote Your Web App
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Should you go Beyond Relational Databases?
Relational databases, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and various commercial products, have served us well for many years. Lately, however, there has been a lot of discussion on whether the relational model is reaching the end of its life-span, and what may come after it. Should you care? Which database technology should you be using? Of course the [...] No related posts.

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There’s a worryingly high web app mortality rate right now. I think the primary cause is the lack of marketing knowledge and how to apply it to web apps. I spoke at FOWA Tour Leeds on this subject so I’m going to summarize the major points below for you. You can also watch the complete video [...]

Six Useful Tips for Web Designers and Developers
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cmswatch - cms news

Is there a best CMS tool for your industry?

I frequently receive questions like this: "We're a major regional hospital, what's the best CMS for us?" Or, "What would you recommend for a mid-sized manufacturing firm?" Or, "What's the right WCM package for a consumer goods company?" Or, "What's getting traction among not-for-profit organizations?" And so on.

First, let's dispense with the idea that there is such a thing as a universally "best" or "leading" CMS. Instead, different vendor offerings "fit" better or worse against individual business scenarios. And of course your budget, architecture, and locale matter too.

So, let's consider the following specific case: you're the Intranet manager for a car parts manufacturer. You're looking to implement a Web CMS for your Intranet, and you've narrowed the choice down two vendors, both with local offices and competent consulting partners, both bidding approximately the same price. Do you prefer Vendor A, whose CMS has gotten implemented several automotive companies? Or Vendor B, who knows little about car parts but whose CMS offering was built primarily for Intranet environments?

For web content management I don't believe your industry matters very much. If it did, there would not be 30+ individual Web CMS vendors and open source projects with installations in the U.S. federal government space, and nearly that many among U.K. public-sector agencies. You'll find a similar breadth of WCM suppliers active within other verticals, like higher education, health care, and financial services.

Note that the situation is completely different in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) marketplace. By ECM I'm referring to imaging + document management + records management. Document-oriented technologies are very process-oriented, so requirements can become very industry-specific. Consider the example of Autonomy (formerly Interwoven) Worksite, a product purpose-built for the legal profession. Moreover, resellers will frequently take a broad ECM platform and re-wire it for a particular industry. Consequently, in our ECM vendor evaluations -- in addition to functional and business scenarios -- we focus on the vendor's "fit" for twelve different industries ranging from Insurance to Pharmaceuticals.

Many Web CMS vendors will disagree, pointing to their industry-specific "solutions." Usually this entails turning off or on various modules, and serving the result up as a single license package. In my experience, when a vendor claims strong industry expertise, it is usually because they have honed their marketing and sales approach to succeed in that space, rather than offering very much that's functionally germane. Vendors who target your industry may know how to speak your vernacular, but that won't count for much after the vendors' account rep and sales engineers leave, and you go into development on what will become (I hope!) a 5+ year investment.

To be sure, I believe it's helpful to consult with your industry peers when selecting any technology. Joining a community of like-minded customers also has value. However, this gets out of hand when, as one U.S. university explained to me, they selected an obscure CMS package simply because they saw that an ivy league school had implemented it.

Selecting the right CMS tool for your enterprise means balancing a variety of different requirements, but a bare minimum, be sure you understand:

What sorts of websites you intend to publish
Your visitors' needs
Your operational profile and goals

So, all else equal, if I were that Intranet manager, I'd give the edge to Vendor B. Of course, the best way to know for sure is to test both bidders head to head before signing any contracts.

In any case, I hope our WCM research can help you find the right fit. Good luck with your projects!

What Wimbledon and vendor selection have in common

As Murraymania swept the UK, I settled into my Court No. 2 seat on Wimbledon's always-action-packed middle Saturday. In addition to the matches of Serbia's Ivanovic, Australia's Hewitt, and Russia's Safina, I had a great view of the Centre Court scoreboard, so during breaks I was keenly watching the results of Andy Roddick's match.

"Andy's got the first set," I said to my cousin, who's studying in London and joined me for the day. "Andy's not playing yet," interjected the Brit to the other side of me. "Yes he is," I said. Pause. "Oh you mean, your Andy," he replied. "Right," I smiled back, "not your Andy, who plays tonight." Then came the most interesting comment: "Well, he's not really my Andy," the gent said. "I'm English, and he's Scottish."

Territorial rivalries are perhaps more pronounced in sport than any other pastime, be it the Boston Red Sox vs. the New York Yankees, the Calgary Flames vs. the Edmonton Oilers, or the New Zealand All Blacks vs. the Australian Wallabies. Such territorial rivalries aren't altogether absent from the content management vendor selection process, either, and I find this much more pronounced on the eastern side of the Atlantic than in my native North America.

Of course, in Europe and the UK there are many nations and territories (both political and historic) in a comparatively tiny geographic area, which makes a perfect petri dish for such rivalries to fester.

When I work with clients or subscribers to help them select vendors, the two or three finalists often end up being very technologically similar, and once tools have been tested and deemed appropriate for clients' environments, the conversations just prior to final selection often become very much "cultural." It's not just about whether the team is qualified, and if the support line is open when their time zone is open for business. It's also about who they are, and when a few hundred thousand sterling or euros are on the table, the rivalries come out in closed-door conversations.

"They're Belgian -- there's so many jokes about Belgium. Isn't there a reason for that?"
"They're Dutch -- so they're blunt, that's good, right? Aren't the Dutch cheap, too?"
"They're German -- so regimented -- is that right for us? What if the schedule slips, will they charge us double?"
I wouldn't even know where to start on the Scandinavian rivalries, which go back to the days when Sweden and Denmark traded off conquering the whole of Northern Europe.

I end up spending quite a bit of time talking with clients about how they can benefit from vendor characteristics that are different from how their company normally functions. A bit of German organization and Dutch bluntness can be a great thing if your company has neither. I also watch vendors make an extra effort to bring in the "local flavor" to meetings -- someone from the local country or territory, if headquarters is on the other side of the continent. This always makes a big difference to buyers -- more than I believe it should. The English sales guy in the meeting in London isn't going to be the one you'll be working with, or providing you the ongoing service you'll need. Good service is good service, regardless of where it's provided from.

As an American who does a lot of work in Europe and the UK, I also experience trepidation on the part of some buyers. "Oh, you're American," I sometimes hear when I connect with a potential client via phone or meet up in person. Well yes, but CMS Watch is also a UK Limited Company, and one of our Principals is a Brit, and I'm perfectly happy to use the word "whilst" and drink a warm beer with you after work, if it makes you more comfortable. (Note: Americans can be even more blunt that the Dutch.) Expertise may be what matters in the end, but it's far from the only factor when closing a deal.

Stereotyping is dangerous, and as the world becomes smaller, you the technology buyer need to think more about benefiting from that which may seem foreign or "too different" for your organization. Yes, chemistry is important, but suppliers should be adept enough to adapt to your environment, and yet bring new approaches and attitudes to the project to help you be successful. Be it tennis or a vendor competition, the most appropriate mix of factors need to come together to create success, and sometimes those characteristics may not be the ones you're used to, or possessed by your fellow countryman.

As for my final take on Wimbledon: I wish Rafael Nadal wasn't injured. I'd love to see Federer break the majors record, but I'd be just as thrilled to see Roddick pull through. I don't care where Andy Murray is from, I'll cheer for him to play well, along with anyone willing to call himself a Briton.

May the best player win, wherever he's from.

Clickability shows how not to write a white paper

White papers are not something we typically critique or comment on, but Clickability's new white paper, billed on their website as "What Vignette is Not Telling You," does, in fact, require special comment.

The paper's stated goal "is to provide strategic data and insights that will help in your decision-making process regarding Web Content Management." But the four-page phillipic quickly reveals itself as little more than an arrogant, shrill, and sometimes factually incorrect attack on Vignette and its new parent company, Open Text.

Many of the criticisms made in the white paper (involving upgrade pain, migration pain, slow product innovation, high licensing costs) will be familiar to any student of Vignette-bashing. There's truth in some of the claims, certainly, but it's a dated kind of truth, applying mostly to the Vignette of 2002 or 2004.

The truth is that Vignette has made a good-faith effort, over the past two years, to address many of the well-known criticisms about its products. Along the way, they've managed to produce a significant number of new products and rolled out non-trivial updates to existing ones. They've also become more competitive on pricing, and have clearly gotten the message on upgrade pain. So to drag out the standard laundry list of complaints about the Vignette of Olde and paint the company (yet again) as an innovation-averse, customer-ignoring purveyor of overpriced, outmoded goods is like beating a horse that died two years ago.

Of course, the positive changes that have happened to Vignette and its product line in 2008-2009 are of little comfort to you if you're still running the old V5 or V6. There will be pain involved in moving to a new or different platform. And that's clearly a selling opportunity for vendors like FatWire and Clickability. But those V5/V6 customers are already well aware of their dilemma -- and what does it say about the vendor that pursues that narrow group by painting an entire competing vendor as incompetent?

There are other problems with the white paper. Clickability associates a quote involving "lipstick on a pig" with CMSWire in one part of the paper and then (inaccurately) with CMS Watch in another. In truth, the lipstick statement actually comes from an anonymous comment at the end of an article that appeared on CMSWire.

The name "CMS Watch" occurs four times in the white paper. Lest there be any misunderstanding, CMS Watch was not consulted prior to the paper's release. Our approval was neither sought nor given.

That goes also for the use of my name in the white paper. I did say, in a blog post about Open Text's acquisition of Vignette, that "Open Text's mishmash of .NET, C++, and Java technologies is not particularly well aligned with Vignette's J2EE-based systems" and that "Vignette only adds another layer to -- it in no way reconciles -- Open Text's crazy quilt of technologies." The Clickability paper repurposes these quotes out of context, hoping to turn technical analysis into scathing indictment. That wasn't my intent.

Even if a person at an ad agency (rather than inside Clickability) wrote this so-called white paper, someone at Clickability should know enough about Marketing 101 to understand that you can't mud-sling your way to success. Good marketing isn't about making the competition look bad. It's about raising yourself up. In this case, if Clickability somehow finds itself raised up by this, it will be because it has been hoisted by its own petard.

The Omniture Drag - and your quest for aligning web content and analytics

In recent months I've encountered several customers of web analytics mega-vendor Omniture who had a very specific gripe about the platform: it was too hard to integrate Omniture reports and analytics into other applications, specifically their Web CMS dashboards. (Note: I'm not talking here about integrating vendor's JavaScript tracking code into your CMS -- that's usually trivial -- but rather, exposing reports in a CMS dashboard.)

At least three Web CMS vendors have also privately complained to us about Omniture in this regard. I think it's revealing that CMS vendors announce plans to implement Omniture reports in-line, but they never seem to come off.

To be fair, report integration can get difficult other analytics vendor offerings as well. My colleague Phil Kemelor points out that WebTrends and other commercial web analytics vendors can also be rigid in this regard. He's right, although I've seen WebTrends report or data integrations across various CMS packages, but have never seen anything similar with Omniture reports.

As our Web Analytics research subscribers know, Omniture has a reputation for being particularly closed when it comes to exporting data or reports. It wants to become your web data warehouse and central analytics hub. Case in point: you have to go to great lengths even to remove Omniture's logo from their reports when e-mailing them around internally.

I believe this mountain-comes-to-mohammed approach represents a hidden drag on Omniture licensees.

Why does this matter? I think content managers want to access analytics in a place where they can take action. Omniture would have you log into their dashboard, but many casual web managers find that too complicated, too remote, and not actionable. Web managers then tend to turn to (the probably over-worked) in-house Omniture guru. That seems wasteful. In these economic times, analytics are too important to be left only to analysts.

(One increasingly evident alternative -- resorting to the lightweight traffic metrics possibly built into your CMS -- doesn't solve the problem either. These CMS-driven systems typically deliver sub-standard metrics that even their vendors won't fully stand behind.)

Integration aside, the larger point is that web managers need to get savvier about analytics, rather than depending on others. Questions abound. What are the key technical issues? What data can you trust more than others? How do you effectively measure campaigns? And so on. (Disclosure: we answer many of these questions in our Web Analytics Fundamentals certificate course.) However you get there, if you're a web manager or web content specialist, learn more about analytics. Then push your vendor to deliver the right reports to the publishing tools you already use every day -- so you can act on them.

What do you think?

Will NYC go with Google Analytics?

Just read an interesting post on Tom Miller's blog summarizing NYC Mayor Bloomberg's keynote note from the Personal Democracy Forum. Miller's take on the speech was that the city may use Google Analytics for optimizing web site content. From this passage about the Bloomberg presentation, I'd have to agree:

The Mayor also announced that the city is going to partner with Google to study "anonymous usage data" to "allow us to optimize the content on the web site based on what people are most often searching for."

I have to say, the idea of government web sites using Google Analytics makes me a bit uneasy from a privacy perspective. I just can't get comfortable with the idea of the government passing data to GA so Google can come up with new ways to advertise and market.

There's a lot of activity going on these days around the subject of web analytics and government as it relates to the Obama Administration Open Government initiative and the release of the Web Analytics Association Report on Government and Web Analytics.

We don't usually think of the public sector as a hotbed of web analytics activity, but change has been long overdue. It's great to see that change may be on the way. Hopefully it will be sorted out so that there is a reasonable balance between analytics value and personal privacy protection.

search engine watch

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Balancing Efficiency and Volume in Paid Search
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Share Your Way to Better SEO
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Selling SEO Projects Against PPC Campaigns
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3 Common Social Media Mistakes
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Bing -- Early Estimations in Local Search
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Link Marketing Challenges & Solutions
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Applying Probability to Landing Page Optimization
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Top Signs Your Site Isn't Ready for Prime Time
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Taking the Fear Out of Web Analytics for Your Small Business
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Get Your Head Out of the Sand
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Effective PPC Ad Copy 101, Part 2
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Bing: The Agency Perspective
It's true that Bing has low market share and likely won't put a dent in Google at this time. But we need to get back to some fundamentals and think about what it could mean for the future of online marketing. ...

paypal developer news

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