Wrap-up: Web CMS Shortlist 2009

Thank you to the many readers who decided to respond to our recent blog post Web CMS Shortlist 2009.

The idea of creating the list came after years of advising buyers on CMS selection and hearing about CMS selection from our extended community of members, conference delegates and esteemed speakers. According to conventional wisdom the CMS marketplace is confusing, crowded and complex, but it turned out that many of the same CMS vendors kept appearing on the customer shortlists. Putting together a shortlist is a challenging part of CMS selection, especially if you don’t use external expertise. Therefore, the main intention was to help you — the buyers — by sharing the list of frequently appearing vendors.

J. Boye is not saying that the 10 vendors are safe choices for everybody and certainly not saying that the list represents the best choices for every imaginable scenario. We are simply recommending that large and complex organisations with significant web demands ought to consider those 10 vendors in the current marketplace.

To respond to the many comments, here is some further background on our take:

• Horse-race style evaluations, e.g. Magic Quadrants or Waves, is not our cup of tea. Instead we advice buyers to write a short RFP and perform proper due diligence to find out which CMS and system integrator would be best for them.
• The CMS market is relatively stable and does not change significantly from week to week.
• Long RFP’s with detailed business requirements can be quite a detour for CMS selection, but are profitable exercises for external consultants. If your real priorities are clear, you don’t need to add everything you think of to the RFP.
• Other experts come up with alternative shortlists in their project frequently. We respect that. We encourage all experts to be open about who are on their shortlists and believe that transparency makes for more open and honest discussions.
• Global vendor footprint is important to ensure successful roll-outs around the world. A local solution may be very good for you and we accept that many large companies continue to buy their CMS from small and local players. Still, we challenge experts to tell us which vendors on the list they would remove and which vendors they would add instead. We want to keep this a shortlist.
• Standards are generally good, but with few exceptions, e.g. Alfresco and Day Software, most vendors have only reluctantly implemented them. We still think it is too early to worry about CMIS for CMS selection.
• Don’t waste your time considering SharePoint as a CMS. Implementing it is quite likely to be painful. Still, SharePoint is widely adopted, in particular since it has been forced on so many web projects – often by IT departments, which already had the licenses. Remember that popular doesn’t equal appropriate; let alone good.
• Does releasing this list mean we are no longer vendor-neutral? Absolutely not! Being vendor-neutral to us means that you openly share your take on vendors, which we regularly do on this blog. You can expect that we will continue to write positive and less positive comments about the vendors on the list and also discus some of the vendors that did not make it, e.g. eZ Systems and OpenText. Remember that vendors cannot join our community of practice and we don’t do any consulting for vendors. Vendors are welcome at our conferences, also as sponsors, but they have no influence over our selection advice nor over our conference program. In the interest of full disclosure our revenue from vendors is less than 16 % annually.

Feel free to respond below. We appreciate comments from everybody, as long as they adhere to our blog commentary policy. In this way we can engage in a dialogue and hopefully learn from each other and help maturing the industry.

We look forward to continuing the discussion and releasing future editions of the shortlist as well as regional editions.