Congrats to the Prime Minister’s Office; they have recently re-launched their website at www.statsministeriet.dk using a little known CMS called webupdate from Datagraf. The website contains news, coverage from the weekly press briefings, information about the government and also a new section aimed at the younger audience. Unfortunately the site does not meet accessibility requirements and many sections are available in Danish only, including the "young" section.
Datagraf might not be well known outside Denmark, but they do have more than 300 employees making them a sizable vendor in the Danish market. They are predominantly known for their work on customer magazines, trade magazines, online annual reports and digital identity, and like many other communication and design agencies they also have their very own content management system.
If you are new to the Danish content management marketplace, you might think that the number of commercial options is limited to few names, such as Composite, Dynamicweb, Microsoft, Sitecore and Tangora. In reality there are about 200 vendors, all counting household names as references. In addition there are quite a few open source projects and some international vendors with or without a local presence, making it a crowded marketplace! The same goes for all of the 10 other European countries where we have members in our community of online professionals and where we consequently have some degree of local market understanding. Each country seems to have several hundred different content management systems, most of which are unknown outside their home country.
The good news for you as a critical buyer is that competition is thriving and in the current economy you can get some very attractive deals. Interestingly, while other vendors are letting people go, Datagraf are currently recruiting.
The bad news for buyers, is that in just a few years, the vendors and products that you today consider “safe” might no longer support their content management system. An example of this in the recent past is the popular but discontinued Microsoft CMS 2002. To reduce risk, I advise you to look closely at both product features for your prospective CMS and at the important vendor intangibles, such as roadmap, community, documentation and references.
[...] Today, many websites, even new government sites, fail miserably at accessibility tests, c.f. The Danish Prime Minister’s Office or the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference. United Kingdom, is the positive exception here, where [...]
I totally understand what you’re saying about “discontinued” products and the position that vendors place customers into when they twilight a product. However, in Microsoft’s defense, MCMS 2002, while discontinued as a product, was replaced by SharePoint 2007. SharePoint not only had roughly the same feature set, but enabled many organizations to reduce the number of products in use, since many MCMS users were also SharePoint users.
Yes, SharePoint 2007 is the replacement product for MCMS 2002. With an upgrade path as expensive as a replacement by any other vendor, perhaps basing your website on Datagraf is a safer choice for buyers.