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The CMS Report says more than 200 companies are offering commercial products called Content Management Systems. This does not include most of the 50 no-cost open-source products described on cmsinfo.org. The Google and DMOZ Directories list hundreds more with CMS offerings. There are many many thousands of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) who have transformed themselves into ASPs (Application Service Providers) by providing online editing of web site pages - which they describe as Content Management.
Three of the five members of this panel have written their own CMS's! Many of you might write your own. You will join the company of tens of thousands of do-it-yourself CMS developers.
So how do you sift through this enormous market and understand what you should build or buy or rent (from an ASP) - or consider proposing to your non-profit clients if you are a web site developer?
First, you should know that the CMS marketplace is in violent turmoil, with massive shakeouts, mergers, and acquisitions going on as we speak. A large fraction of CMS installations have been business disasters. See comments on a Forrester Research Report that finds CM systems "immature." A typical quote, "We spent $1.2 million on our CMS and only 3 people are using it."
Second, you need to know that products range in price from essentially free to millions of dollars. We will tell you a bit about a few representative systems (and provide you with web references for many more) so you are knowledgeable enough to explain their possibilities to your clients.
Third, we expect a lot more change in the next few years, especially in the direction of more integration of services like e-commerce, community, and collaboration as the big companies demand integrated enterprise management systems. We'll take a look in a crystal ball at the future of web publishing.
Some (mostly local) examples.
CMS industry pioneer Future Tense from Woburn, MA was acquired by Open Market in Boston, who were in turn acquired by divine, one of the top-tier CMS companies.
University of Vancouver Shakespeare professor Jerry Sinclair (an old Hypercard stack publisher), sold her nCompass Resolution to Microsoft and it is now the Microsoft Content management Server.
Another local CMS innovation was Inso Dynabase, later eBT, developed by XML designer and Brown University professor Steven DeRose. eBT closed their doors, selling some assets, in 2001.
Cambridge's Ars Digita [founded by Philip Greenspun, the database-backed-website guru and MIT professor who wrote a lovely book on Web Publishing featuring his dog Alex] raised tens of millions in venture capital, then crashed when Philip was driven out by the VC's.
CMS industry leader Vignette is acquiring epicentric. Document management pioneer Documentum has bought Cambridge-based eRoom (a collaboration toolset). Both are repositioning themselves more as integrated Enterprise Management Systems.
RedHat (the Linux Operating System reseller) bought parts of Philip Greenspun's ACS (the Ars Digita Community System) and have reconfigured it as their Content and Collaboration Management Solution. The RedHat CCM system was rearchitected in Java, so original ACS customers are left with their Tcl-language solutions. They have started their own open-source support group.
And when Jeremy Allaire sold his Cambridge company to Macromedia (who bought it for Cold Fusion and the HomeSite HTML Editor), they dropped the Spectra CMS (although it had several happy clients), perhaps in favor of another source code management system they have repackaged as a web project management tool called Macromedia Sitespring.
These top-tier systems can support dozens of writers, editors, graphic designers, layout specialists, legal departments, and content approval publishers working simultaneously without conflicting. Privileges are managed by each person's "role" in the system. They can manage thousands of web pages and schedule them to play on certain dates, perfect for big newspapers and magazines. They can release pages simultaneously in multiple languages. They can archive all this work, and instantly switch ("roll back") to earlier versions if needed.
Top-tier tools tend to emphasize the production phase. This includes acquisition and aggregation of assets, conversion of files to web formats, chunking documents into reusable "components," tagging them with metadata that marks their function in the document model, and designing the "templates" into which the component objects will be assembled.
Although all these can do the Delivery or Publishing phase, the biggest companies often require multiple high-speed caching web servers to deliver millions of "static" versions of the "dynamic" pages created by the production machines.
Even middle-tier tools have sophisticated workflow controls to know who is working on what page. They all have templates that "separate the presentation from the content." This means that content authors can concentrate on getting the words and pictures right and layout specialists can style the pages uniformly throughout the web site.
They can "tag" content component objects with metadata that allow the object to be used in more than one web page, with one update changing all appearances.
Ektron has a popular WYSIWYG interface they sell to many other CMS companies to allow visual editing of web pages from the browser. CMS200 can convert Word files to HTML. It has multilingual support, and it can "promote" pages from a production (development) environment to delivery (publishing) servers.
AtomZ Publish lets you produce dynamic documents on their servers and then they push or promote static versions to your web servers.
Userland Frontier and Manila are very popular tools for editing web pages on a personal level. Many small organizations are adopting them as management information tools.
Phil will tell us more about these products.
The reason that so many CMS companies are rushing to integrate or be integrated is that web users are coming to expect that all their work will some day be possible through a web browser interface.
Organizations of the future - and non-profits being more open than most should lead the way here - can expose most of their activities to the web.
Their financials, fundraising, projects, events, job descriptions, volunteer needs and schedules, and their publications will all be manageable through the web.
Staff can work from home on flex schedules (posted on the web site of course) to accomplish tasks and small action items written by them and their managers on the web, with transparent tools that let them edit their web pages almost as easily as browsing them.
We will have web-based word processors and web-based spreadsheets. We will make our presentations over the web. All our email will be web-based like HotMail, so we can read it and write it from anywhere. There will be web access to our organization databases (see Michelle Murrain's XINA efforts - "XINA is not Access").
In short, today's desktop office software will become web office software. Your web office, complete with the bookmarks in your browser, will go with you wherever you are. And all your work (and play) could and perhaps should be on the web, because as Tim Berners-Lee likes to say - "if it's not on the web, it doesn't exist."
Whether this comes about because Microsoft's .NET or Sun's JavaONE technology lets us rent the same Office applications we know today, or someone else writes open-source and really free equivalents that cost organizations very little (because there is no per-user software charge) remains to be seen.
Models for all these future services are the so-called "free" tools showing up on so many web sites. You can create a "free" user group at Yahoo's eGroups. You can have "free" email at HotMail. You can keep your files (documents and MP3 files, for example) on Microsoft's "free" X-drive. You can put your presentations on the BrainShark server.
What "free" really means for these services is "you look at their ads and they look at your data."
With the integrated small enterprise information systems of the future, eveything - your word documents, spreadsheets, databases, presentations, mail, and your content management and web publishing tools will all run privately and securely on the organization's computer, what I am calling a "community computer" rather than a "personal computer."
But let's get back to the present and Nick Gleason will tell you what current Content Management Systems can do for an organization today.
