All modern CMS vendors claim to be capable of delivering content to mobile devices. Some even offer additional modules to make the implementation faster and easier. However, as a customer, how do you separate marketing from reality? We decided to explore how seriously the vendors treat mobile devices and took a look at their websites through a mobile device. As expected, the results were quite mixed.
Even when I used to work at a CMS vendor myself back in 1999 - 2002, customers would regularly require to have content delivered to mobile devices. Back then most customers did not go ahead and implement mobile services, but that has certainly changed today. The arrival of the iPhone in particular has made this development spiral. The mobile Web has rapidly moved far beyond the early adopters.
To be fair to vendors, some customers may still not know exactly know what they want and are simply "ticking the box" when they ask for mobile support. Still, it seems reasonable to expect vendors to "eat their own dogfood" now that they claim their product supports mobile devices so easily. I can imagine several use cases where customers might want to visit a vendor website on a mobile device, eg. for contact details and to read news.
Here's the vendor and open source project websites that we visited:
| Vendor / project | Passed / Failed | Notes |
| Alfresco | Failed | Clearly not optimized for the mobile user; navigation broken and reference logos appeared twice |
| Alterian | Failed | Very long load times and difficult to navigate and find out location on site |
| CoreMedia | Failed | Not impressive for a vendor claiming to focus on "multi-touchpoint customer engagement". Usage of HTTPS caused user experience to start with 2 warnings. Navigation broken and Flash error message. Would have passed if iPhones were the only mobile devices on the planet |
| Day Software | Failed | Again, navigation a complete mess. Also text as graphics don't work well |
| Ektron | Failed | Looks like something was done to cater for mobile devices as the site started with a friendly navigation, unfortunately followed by the heavy web navigation based on images |
| EPiServer | Failed | A nice integration error at the middle of the page. Clearly not optimized for mobile devices. According to EPiServer an iPhone demo is available on labs.episerver.com |
| FatWire | Failed | Top navigation unusable. "Learn More" links unreadable. |
| Kentico | Failed | Navigation and user experience clearly not optimised for a mobile interface |
| Plone | Passed | Works, although 3 columns require quite some mobile interface real estate |
| SDL | Failed | Several navigational items not working. Site kaput. |
| Sitecore | Passed | A fast and smooth experience. Read more on Sitecore Mobile Web CMS |
| Telerik | Failed | Some SEO text visible on top of page. Navigation unusable |
| Typo3 | Failed | Navigation cut short. Typo3 is definitely not enabling people to communicate on a mobile device |
| Umbraco | Failed | "Who said you" can read a page when there a multiple layers of text on top of each other. Not friendly at all. |
| WordPress | Passed | Well designed with intuitive layout. Good job. |
It would seem like a clear majority of vendors still have a long way to go. Congrats to Plone, Sitecore and WordPress on jobs well done.
For additional details on mobile delivery, including some specialized products, CMS Watch analyst Apoorv Durga have written a posting on Content Management for Mobile Delivery
Thanks to @athraen, @BrianBentzen, @jdavidhobbs and @s2d_jamesr for helpful input.
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Any CMS that gives you proper control of the markup will let you create a good mobile browsing experience if you know what you’re doing and plan for it up front. I think a better differentiator is the authoring tools you get on a Mobile. For example, WordPress for iPhone lets me write my blog offline while stuck in the underground. SharePoint has a (rather ugly) iPhone client. Which other vendors have specific client applications these days?
dont know about others, but there is a mobile “version” of Plone or better to say add-on.
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/gomobile.mobile
maybe if you are doing mobile testing you should include also this. with it i’m sure we’ll get perfect score :)
Could you please provide some links on pages you test it.
I am not sure if I understand this review well. As far as I know none of the CMS “converts” sites to mobile friendly out of the box. I don’t think it is not CMS work to do it in first place but web developers to make sure his/her’s markup and design works in all devices. Mobile website is just another interface for the website. I have worked with Sitecore, Umbraco and WordPress and all of them lets editor to choose any kind of design for the website and if developer is not taking care of mobile support CMS will fail.
I would like to see though which CMS’s lets editor work in CMS backend on mobile devices?
Hey Jukka-Pekka
I’ve tested the frontpage as well as a few subpages for each vendor.
I’m not so concerned about what the products do out-of-the-box or if it requires an add-on. I’m simply listing which vendors have a mobile interface to their web presence. Apparently only very few
Hi Janus,
I am using Nokia 5800 (S60) Mobile. I tried accessing fatwire.com and navigated it thru the top header links and the ‘Learn more’ Links. It works fine for me.
More than the content, it depends on how you deliver and the device in which the content is rendered. I am not sure but even the device’s browser should make the difference.
so FatWire is ‘passed’ on Nokia 5800 :)
~Lokesh
Hi Janus,
OK, I understand now just should have read your post better. Sorry :)
I made some smoke testing on HTC Magic (Android 1.6) Phone and it seems that all sites works pretty fine (except the one that has Flash in their site) but still I would love to take this challenge on CMS backend itself. Would be interesting to see which is the best Mobile CMS admin. Without trying out, I would bet on WordPress.
All of us at Ektron humbly accept the “Fail”. We claim to be the cobbler’s daughter that has no shoes – BUT, are well underway a complete website redesign and it’s an interesting process going through the same methods our customers do. I will agree with Jon that any mobile-conscious CMS will give the developer the ability to build a great mobile site. I think what’s even more important is how organizations cater to the mobile user. Is it just doing a Mobile OS detection and displaying the content with a unique CSS? That was the popular approach years ago. What’s more pervasive now, or at least the trend, is to ‘chunk’ your content differently for the mobile user. This will require a CMS solution that can structure content authoring for different devices.
Dave,
If Ektron would like some assistance in designing and developing a new site that overcomes your ‘cobbler’s daughter’ situation I can certainly provide references for E-Cubed. Hell, we won an Ektron Synergy Award from you so that should work as a reference.
I’ll even give you a discount.
Kyle ;)
Hi Janus
We’re not included in your list but please check out http://www.gxwebmanager.com on your mobile to find out that we have a pretty simple but effective mobile website with seperate design and content. If you scroll to the bottom of the page you might see that your mobile device is recognized by our integrated device recognition module.
Martin, Product Manager @ GX
The gomobile.mobile add-on that Rok Garbas mentioned can be seen at http://plonecommunity.mobi, a Plone website that looks great on mobile devices. There is a great presentation by Mikko Ohtamaa about gomobile.mobile and considerations for optimizing for mobile devices in general. http://www.slideshare.net/miohtama/plone-go-mobile
I certainly hope that a more scientific apporach is used when giving your customers advice ;-)
We haven’t optimized our website for mobile for the very simple reason that there’s no interest. In January 2010 we had 0.66% of our visitors to be mobile* (this number was lower in 2009) but the majority of these visitors used “real browsers” ie. visitors who used Mobile Safari (iPhone/iPods) or Android. In these browsers the Umbraco site looks perfect.
If we were to optimize the Umbraco site for those 39 visitors who use an old-school browser (Symbian, etc) I’d say that would be near catastrophical usage of our resources as that’s not even half a percentile (not percent, but 0.044% of our visitors).
Where needed, Umbraco is fully capable of targeting different platforms. As an example look at http://www.paywaremobile.com/ in a desktop browser vs. an iPhone as an example.
Raise the level of your research, please. This blog post is at best a joke, yet it’s not presented that way ;-)
Niels Hartvig,
Umbraco
* Google Analytics mobile breakdown of Jan 2010 on umbraco.org => http://hartvig.com/data/umbraco_org_jan_mobile.pdf
I think this was a nice exercise to ensure that everyone’s eating their own dogfood, so to speak. I’m quite sure everyone will rush to fix their sites. The funny thing is, the table above with the pass/fail notes has a fixed length, and spills over into the right column at a 1024×768 resolution, making the last inch of text in the table unreadable.
You know what they say about casting stones from glass houses. ;-)
@sliewehr
Janus,
I have to say this is one of the most blatant cases of link-baiting in the CMS space I’ve seen in recent history.
How does visiting and rating a vendor’s website somehow correlate to their mobile strategy?
The title of your post clearly says “Who are the leading mobile CMS vendors?”. A casual reader who jumps down to the matrix will assume that most of the listed vendors have no strategy or their mobile solutions are inadequate.
Unless one reads very carefully into your blog post, the reader will be incapable of discerning that all you’re judging is wether they “eat their own dog food” and have mobile-enabled their WWW site. At Alfresco, this has nothing to do with “eating our own dog food”, we’ve simply opted not to create a mobile-friendly version of Alfresco.com, does that mean our product doesn’t handle mobile? One simply does not equate to the other.
If I were you, I would completely revise this blog post from the ground up to make it clear what it is that you’re actually trying to say and do a little more research than just visiting the WWW sites.
If you had, you would’ve found that, at least where Alfresco is concerned, we have a mobile UI for webkit-based devices such as the iPhone and Android:
http://snurl.com/ugwva
I’m honestly ashamed for you…
Unfortunately, I’d have to agree with some of the comments about whether this post really says anything about which systems can help an organization use mobile well.
Janus, you’ve probably often given the (very good) advice that web content management implementations should be driven by a business’ requirements and not a desire to implement everything for its own sake.
As Luis, Niels, and others correctly point out, the fact that a WCM vendor hasn’t created a mobile site doesn’t mean the product doesn’t empower users to successfully leverage mobile channels – it just means that there’s not a demand amongst our prospects or customer base for it.
Case in point: Percussion recently outlined how we’re helping Abilene Christian University (THE bleeding-edge mobile campus) integrate their web content and mobile strategy. However until I’ve determined that serving up our own content for mobile devices will drive leads, improve sales, or support our clients, it would be a bad decision to spend valuable resources building it out.
Chris
http://twitter.com/PercussionChris
Aegis Mobile has developed a mobile web CMS that works across devices and platforms. It’s UI is Droopl based and it allows you to manage content across over 300 devices but also target functionality(including LBS through html5) and design at specific groups of devices based on parameters like function (GPS enabled, touch screen etc..) or user information.
You can find out more about it at http://www.aegismobile.com/blog/index.php/2010/02/16/apollo-mobile-cms/ and view an example at http://m.patfales.com (on any mobile device) Would love to hear your thoughts or questions!
Regards,
klenane@aegismobile.com
Hi Janus,
Meeting you last night reminded me that I wanted to post a reply here – http://www.alterian.com is built on our CMC product and one of our partners has posted this:
http://blog.noko.co.uk/2010/02/guide-to-developing-mobilesmartphone.html
Giving lots of detail about how organisations can build mobile sites on our product.
Cheers,
Ian
Gosh, why not throw another vendor into the mix. SiteExecutive, developed by Systems Alliance revamped its mobile CMS capabilities last March — see release: http://www.systemsalliance.com/news/archive/SAI_PR_09_03_10.html. We have implemented these capabilities in our SiteExecutive Website — yup it’s ready for a redo — and more recently, our Systems Alliance site, which should look good on any leading mobile device: http://www.systemsalliance.com.
Even better, I’d ask you to visit one of our client sites to see how our mobile approach works in the real world — try http://carey.jhu.edu/.
Cheers,
David
Thank you for all the nice comments, even the less positive ones from some of the vendors that failed.
As Jon Marks said in the initial comment:
“Any CMS that gives you proper control of the markup will let you create a good mobile browsing experience if you know what you’re doing and plan for it up front”
A few vendors made the case that it was OK to fail this test, since mobile usage of their website represented only a small fraction of their visitors. I’ll encourage those vendors to see what happens if their website was unusable on say Firefox. Don’t you think Firefox usage would drop dramatically? Did you really expect high mobile usage of your site, when the site fails on mobile devices?
Building a good CMS requires different skills that building a good mobile site. What I learned here is that customers should probably look beyond the traditional Web CMS vendors for help with their mobile projects.
Hi Janus, for you what constitutes “mobile”? Is it the device and its browser capabilities? Screen size? Because I’m looking at this post in Chrome at 1024×768 on a laptop, and your table is overlapped by the advertising on the RHS and is unreadable.
As you say, or I’ll paraphrase: targeting the right user experience requires forethought and planning.
Targeting mobile these days is about designing for small screen usage and enabling finger-friendly navigation. It’s about accessibility without a mouse, and the mouseover paradigm.
CMS vendors’ websites are very unlikely to see a lot of people browsing for decision-making information on their iPhone, as Niels’ stats back-up, and in the case that they do, these browsers can render desktop-targeted sites as a backup. It’s not ideal, but it proves a far better usage of a vendor’s resources than producing a separate UX for such traffic. And it doesn’t just apply to mobile; the same is true of screen readers for accessibility. In the UK it’s actually law that you take Accessibility into account more fully, precisely because based on a cost/return equation alone, many companies were relying on the backup that good modern screen reader gives users – just like the iPhone rendering a desktop-targeted design.
This proves it to be a matter of correct appointing of resources as to whether a vendor produces a small-screen, finger friendly version of their marketing site.
Now, for the *content* sites which these CMS products manage, that’s an entirely different matter – and one which your post doesn’t even attempt to investigate.
You must have got your fair share of traffic over this post, but as you can see from the comments: high traffic isn’t what it’s all about when your users can see through the veil.
> A few vendors made the case that it was OK to fail this test, since mobile usage of their website represented only a small fraction of their visitors.
> I’ll encourage those vendors to see what happens if their website was unusable on say Firefox. Don’t you think Firefox usage would drop dramatically?
> Did you really expect high mobile usage of your site, when the site fails on mobile devices?
Did you read the comments at all? It’s a ridiculous argument. As I pointed out and documented with a link to a full statistics dump there’s no interest. At all. With 0.044% of our visitors being mobile in the traditional sense it’s not a matter of whether they’ll come. At the same time the traditional “mobile” visitor is also dying with the newer mobile browsers capable of displaying (and optimizing) real webpages (as long as you rely on clean markup and standards (ie. no flash)).
Best,
Niels / Umbraco
The most interesting part on this article are the comments. With all respect the blog is not well fundamented ar all. Nowhere the WHAT or the HOW on this list that is being displayed. Only the results; of what is clear after the comments. Too bad, because CMS and mobile devices is an interesting subject. So hereby; if I can be of any help to write an interesting article on this; let me know.
As I read this article you’ve evaluated websites on how they work on a device which is not intentionally supported? At best you evaluate the capabilities of the vendors website – not what features the CMS offers to support mobile devices.
The title is “Who are the leading mobile CMS vendors?” should have read: “Which CMS vendors have a website for mobile visitors”. This would – of course – not be quite as interesting.
Best
Jesper
I’m reading and posting this comment on a mobile device.
Your “winning” cms WordPress did not show me a mobile version of your site. This is fine though, the Android browser knows how to properly display the page by reflowing the conent. Which, again brings up the question: how much do we NEED mobile versions of websites, now that old and crappy mobile browsers are dying and modern browsers do a great job of rendering standards-compliant sites?
Now, just for fun, I tried to post a comment without filling in all the form fields, WordPress leads me to a completely new page with just a error message, making me loose everything that I’ve typed. I would call that a big fat fail.
You might want to check Jaenovation Cloud CMS / Mobile version at http://www.jaenovation.com/mobile-cms
I like it because it is a microsoft product + cloud no need to pay license to get microsoft products
Their showcases is pretty impressive and they provide elite design service
Based on my experience, what’s important today for small businesses is to have a mobile version of their traditional websites in the most cost effective manner. The very main objective of these businesses is to tap into the every growing number of people who use mobile devices to find what they need. For me, I am a photographer who has little knowledge about CSS, HTML, availing the service of full fledged mobile CMS and maintaining a team of web designers is not an option. Though there good alternatives, like my mobile CMS provider brick&mobile (http://www.brickandmobile.com/), they create a good version of your website into a mobile version which would generally carry out all the needed information a consumer needs.
With a service from brick&mobile, I was able to reach out to more potential clients by providing to them in my mobile version of my website, the essential information that they need to establish contact with my business.
Recently there is a pretty good mobile cms called Morces. http://www.morces.com
I would recommend http://www.webfactories.biz, a newly mobile web cms platform. I tried it on ecommerce business Shop Girl and it’s really awesome, fantastic to utilize. The only importance is that the CMS you are using can provide you with all the elements/requirements you need for your business.