Tag Archives: microsoft cms

Why the finances of software vendors matter

Posted on January 24 2010 by Janus Boye

color_graph I've regularly covered annual reports, earnings announcements and other financial news about software vendors. These commentaries tend to stir debate and I am frequently asked why I bother to look behind the numbers. Is it really important?

Many vendors, in particular privately-held US-based ones, don't publicly release audited numbers. Instead they carefully select a few positive numbers to share via a press release. An example of this is seemingly successful CMS-vendor Ektron, which claims to be open and transparent, but will tell you only that their sales grew 38%. If you are willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement, they'll share more details on profitability, but can a vendor really claim to be transparent when you need to sign a contract to get some fundamental numbers about the financial health of the vendor?

In my view financial numbers and annual reports are a great way to gain insights about a vendor. These are the numbers you should indeed care about:

Services revenue. A good example of this is FatWire, where your local key account manager might have told you that they are very committed to their partners, when in fact services bring in about 30% of the company's total revenue.
New license sales. If this is down, it will tell you that the vendor is having difficulty signing up new customers. This can be a sign that an acquisition is lurking around the corner, which is what happened to Vignette as they got acquired by Open Text.
Maintenance and support revenue. If this makes up a large part of revenue, it means that the vendor has many customers who keep using the product. If you can get hold of a renewal percentage or average customer lifetime, it will tell you something about how long the customers stay with the product.
A break-down of revenue by product will tell you which products are really strategic to the vendor. IBM and Google are examples of big vendors, to who far from all products are equally important. This might reveal which products are likely to become discontinued. This happened with Microsoft CMS
Cash is king. Look at the cashflow to find out whether the vendor might be facing survival problems or is sitting on a pile of cash.

After looking at a few vendors, you'll discover that the accounting models tend to differ hugely. Some will list licence sales straight away, while others will break it down and only list it partially over a given period. Some might also divide their revenue between a corporate entity and different geographic regions, e.g. CMS vendor Sitecore. Details like this obviously make it difficult to compare the numbers.

Finally, I would say that the past decade has showed that positive financial numbers by no means guarantee that your favourite vendor will not be acquired or that your favourite product will not be discontinued. 2009 saw quite a few acquisitions, most notably Adobe's acquisition of Omniture and Opentext which bought Vignette. I'm sure we will see more in 2010. These might not impact customers in the short-term, but down the road, they always also have significant impact, e.g. with closed regional offices, a new partner strategy or a cut in engineering spending.

Tagged annual report, ektron, fatwire, finance, google, ibm, microsoft cms, sitecore, vignette | 5 Comments

The real definition of a “key account”

Posted on September 10 2009 by Janus Boye

dream_graph Buyers who account for the majority of revenue for a given product are normally offered preferential treatment of some sort. This would seem fair, but to the surprise of many online professionals this is often not the case when it comes to software vendors or digital agencies.

Over the years I've talked to practitioners around the world from large and complex organisations who have been genuinely disappointed by how they have been treated by their vendors. Despite having been big spenders on licenses or in terms of consulting hours (or both), they still feel that the vendor is not listening to requirements and paying any real attention to their needs.

A good example is how Microsoft have treated their CMS customers in the past. The early adopters were left behind with Microsoft CMS 2002 without an upgrade option when Microsoft released SharePoint 2007. Large organisations, such as drinks giant Carlsberg, global manufacturer Danfoss and Royal Mail in the UK, did adopt CMS 2002 yet still Microsoft decided that it was best to ask customers to start all over again.

For smaller vendors, there are several worse examples of poor key account management that have left customers frustrated.

My usual advice is that it helps talking to vendors. It helps even more if you join up with other buyers. Even if you don't work in a large multinational or for a world-famous NGO, you can become a key account by using diplomatic skills and engaging in a dialogue with your vendors, so that your projects are visible inside the vendor organisation.

The real definition of a key account is not necessarily tied to revenue. You are a key account if the vendor listens to you, accepts your feedback, specifies appropriate actions and shares a timeline with you. You need to be patient, you need to be forgiving, you need to be reasonable, but the rewards in potential cost savings and ability to plan better should make it well worth it.

Thanks to @brendanquinn and @twentworth12 for valuable input.

Tagged agency, microsoft, microsoft cms, vendors | 3 Comments

Is content management important to Microsoft?

Posted on July 28 2009 by Janus Boye

Microsoft used to have a product called Content Management Server 2002; the sole purpose of this was to be a content management system. This was followed by the popular SharePoint 2007, in which "Content Management" was reduced to only one of six pillars. With SharePoint 2010, the packaging has been changed once again and the emphasis on CMS additionally reduced to simply "Content", which is a pillar on its own. Is it wrong to interpret this as a sign that Microsoft is attaching even less importance to content management?

There are several additional indicators of this in the marketplace:

MCMS 2002 and SharePoint 2007 shared numerous weaknesses when used for public websites, notably around globalization, accessibility and standards support. In fact, CMS 2002 was far better than SharePoint 2007 concerning all of these areas. It was also superior when it came to building websites that worked in multiple browsers. It is too early to tell whether any of these will be improved or fixed for SharePoint 2010, but according to Microsoft they have been working on it.
As we detailed in Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites, many organisations did not carefully consider whether SharePoint 2007 was the best match for their requirements and many paid a significant price for this. Nobody enjoys having unhappy customers and Microsoft has collected quite a few.
Competing .NET-based CMS vendors, eg. Ektron, EPiServer, Sitecore and Umbraco have had good times as many decided to keep SharePoint behind the firewall and use something more appropriate for their public website.
CMS 2002 was a product in its own right and provided a full content management solution. SharePoint 2007 was the replacement which was sold and named as being a small part of the mighty Office package, even though public websites required additional licensing. The Office-bundling and joint marketing definitely helped drive SharePoint adoption. SharePoint 2007 also came with improved integration with Microsoft Word which showed some continued commitment to content management. With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has not only changed "Content Management" to "Content" they have also come up with new terms for almost everything. Moreover, when SharePoint 2010 is released, it will be without the Office name. When examining the new Microsoft terminology, you won't find many words from the Content Management Bible.
Upgrading from CMS 2002 to SharePoint 2007 was a nightmare and according to experts upgrading to SharePoint 2010 will be even harder. At this time, very few details have actually been released about the actual upgrade process, but it seems like this upgrade will be more about governance than technology.
The product documentation for SharePoint 2007 is quite weak with regards to content management compared to the other 5 pillars.

Perhaps Oxite, Microsoft's open source Web CMS, which was originally released back in 2008, is the future of content management at Microsoft? A recent blog by Microsoft Software Design Engineer Erik Porter on Planning for the Next Oxite Release reveals some interesting details. I asked Porter for additional details and he said Oxite did not have any funding yet, but the side-project was gaining momentum, both inside and outside Microsoft.

Content management may not be as interesting and business-critical as other areas, such as business intelligence, but to me it seems as if Microsoft is communicating clearly that content management is not a high priority, at least not in SharePoint. What's your take?

Thanks to Mauro Cardarelli and Shawn Shell for constructive input!

Tagged content management, microsoft, microsoft cms, SharePoint | 3 Comments

DIY SharePoint

Posted on June 30 2009 by Peter Sejersen

Aalborg Kommune did SharePoint with the do-it-yourself approach. Niels Højdahl Pedersen shares lessons learned in this article The municipality of Aalborg; Denmark’s fourth largest city, recently relaunched their website using SharePoint 2007. They chose the unusual route of running the project in-house with minimal involvement from third party system integrators. I talked to the responsible project manager, Niels Højdahl Pedersen, about the lessons learned.

Accessibility for SharePoint 2007 will cost you
Q: Did the relaunch of the website on 18 June go according to the original plan?

A: "In the short term, yes, but in the longer term the project was delayed significantly, because of an ongoing expansion of the project scope.

The project started about 18 months ago with the ambition of revitalising the website by optimizing content and structure. We soon realised, that it needed a significant amount of work, so we decided that a new information architecture and design were needed. Unfortunately, our former platform; Microsoft CMS 2002, was not meeting our requirements and Microsoft furthermore proclaimed that their support would expire in April 2009. So we decided to upgrade to SharePoint 2007 with a plan to use it for our intranet as well later on.

When we asked system integrators for prices, they nearly doubled their quotes when we mentioned accessibility and standards compliance, which is legally required by public organisations in Denmark. So we decided to mostly do the project internally with our IT department, who had .NET experience but had never worked with SharePoint 2007. It was a major challenge to get the technical organisation up and running. We also soon learned that development and adjustments in SharePoint requires huge effort.

Throughout the process we kept a third party system integrator on the sideline for when our own people got stuck. They also did a quality review of the technical setup, which they actually complimented - particularly the speed with which the process had been completed."

Aalborg Kommune website as of 26. june 2009

Educate your users well
Q: Has it been necessary to make organisational changes during the project?

A: "First of all we have adjusted the number of content contributors from 200 to 60 [not a bad idea according to Janus Boye: Few web editors is better for your website]. These have been trained to write better for the web. Still, strange things happened when we opened up the system to them. We have also set up an informal network of about 10 people, who track changes and guide the editors. Another thing we are working on is an integration of Compliance Sheriff from HiSoftware to the editorial workflow to ensure that the editors comply with the rules we set up.

In the future we might want to get a more tight governance structure in place if we are to stick to our ambitions when it comes to quality and accessibility. This could also help us realise our digital strategy of making the website the preferred entrance point to the public sector for citizens and organisations in our municipality."

Don't underestimate the technical challenges
Q: What is your best advice to others using SharePoint 2007 for a public website?

A: "Do not underestimate technical maintenance of the platform. SharePoint is a cumbersome and complicated platform to work with and things take time – especially if you want to focus on accessibility and compliance.

You also need to educate your users well, because most things are not particularly obvious in MOSS. And even if you educate you users well you have to set up strict technical limitations to prevent undermining the accessibility rules."

Caveats when choosing a system integrator
I would stress, that even if you want to run your SharePoint project by yourself like Aalborg Kommune, you should still find an experienced system integrator. When choosing a partner, there are several caveats you’ll need to be aware of. My colleague Janus Boye has also recently shared a list of overlooked SharePoint success factors, which you might want to take into account. Another good resource is our report Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites, which gathers experiences from early adopters and provides decision support for business users in all project phases.

Our best advice is as always to talk to other users of the system and learn from their experiences.

Tagged accessibility, case, cms, microsoft, microsoft cms, SharePoint, success, system integrator | Leave a comment

HyperContent: A dead open source CMS?

Posted on June 1 2009 by Janus Boye

Do you know if your CMS is dead or alive? Whether it has a bright or a bleak future? When higher education software consortium Jasig announced that they would discontinue their support for HyperContent in December 2008, it was a timely reminder that systems do die. Who knows whether other and more popular systems are about to suffer the same fate as HyperContent?

To quote from the announcement:

The community of adopters has not grown enough to attract multiple committers, and new development has been frozen for well over a year. As a result, the application no longer meets criteria for our continued sponsorship.

HyperContent was a fully featured open source Java-based Web CMS. It had seen some adoption among higher education, e.g. Columbia University, University of Latvia and The University of Hull which is still using it today. HyperContent can no longer be found on the Jasig website, but interestingly the project front page still exists on hypercontent.sourceforge.net. On this page the most recent release from 2006 is promoted as news and Jasig is mentioned as still sponsoring the system.

I am hopefully not the only one who thinks there are too many systems in the Web CMS marketplace. In my years in the young web industry, I've seen a few of systems that have died a slow death:

The Mambo open source development team ended up disagreeing with an effort led by a private company in 2005 and then created a new CMS called Joomla! Today Mambo no longer seems to have a sustaining community.
Microsoft CMS which in 2006 was replaced by SharePoint. Even today Microsoft CMS is still in use. To be fair, Microsoft continues to provide support and security fixes for a limited period.
Synkron Via, a Danish commercial CMS originally released in 2006. Local competitor Dynamicweb stepped in to buy Synkron in 2007 and in 2008 CMS Watch dropped coverage of Synkron Via. Earlier this year Dynamicweb slashed the last remaining Synkron Via engineers. To be fair, Dynamicweb is still signing up new customers, so time will tell whether Synkron Via might recover and get back in shape.

If your CMS is riding into the sunset, you are effectively forced to select a new platform and invest time in implementing it. This might be good news as an overhaul of your web infrastructure could be long overdue. However, a scenario in which outside factors control your agenda is less than ideal.

Even though some vendors might be dying, the list of significant systems continue to grow. Alfresco, SilverStripe and Umbraco are among the most recent additions. In other words: Consolidation is still some years out.

When you consider the longevity of your CMS, look carefully at the same factors as Jasig did. A community is more important than features and if the latest major release is from over a year ago, it is usually a very bad sign.

Which CMS could be next?

Tagged cms, dynamicweb, jasig, mambo, microsoft cms, open source, wcm | 2 Comments

Are you still using Microsoft CMS 2002?

Posted on January 13 2009 by Janus Boye

Yesterday I had the honour of acting as moderator in our first community of practice meeting in 2009. Interestingly, I met two member organisations at the meeting that were still using Microsoft Content Management Server (CMS) 2002, even though the product was originally released back in July 2001. One of the organisations is planning to "upgrade" to SharePoint 2007 during 2009, while the other is in the process of migrating an important site onto Microsoft CMS 2002.

This is a scenario you will find not just here in Aarhus, Denmark, but around the world: Microsoft CMS 2002 SP2, which is the most recent and final release from Microsoft, is still actively used in many organisations, which have had other things to do than upgrading to SharePoint 2007 or changing their CMS every 3 years.

Here's my advice for those of you working with Microsoft CMS 2002:

The upgrade to SharePoint 2007 is actually more like a replacement, and far from as easy as Microsoft described it in their letter to Content Management Server customers in 2006. It might be a better idea to wait for Office 14, due out in beta later this year.
Many implementation partners have created custom-built modules for CMS 2002, which will offer you additional functionality and shorten implementation times, but will add complexity to future upgrades. You could easily end up being locked to your implementation partner.
If you need search, remember that CMS has no search engine at all, and you will need to integrate with a third-party product.
For new projects, make sure you implement harmless URL's, hereby preventing problems later on.
Product training is key as the interface will not seem modern to young colleagues, nor will it seem intuitive to older colleagues. They will need some time to get used to the interface.

Are you also using CMS 2002? Do you have any advice to share?

Tagged cms, microsoft, microsoft cms, SharePoint | 7 Comments