I have been working with WCM & ECM for over 7 years. Designing and developing solutions for my customers. I have worked with customer of all sizes from large corporate and fortune 100 companies, to Federal Agencies, and smaller companies. This blog will be dedicated to helping others in the CMS industry find solutions that are sometimes outside the box. Having worked for a large ECM vendor for several years it has been nice to not be as restricted in the solutions that I provide.

About Me

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Alfresco and...

I am very lucky in the position I have right now. I am able to work with Alfresco's WCM and Interwoven's TeamSite. In fact I finished upgrading a customer to the new version of TeamSite over the weekend. Working with both products the way I have been for a while now has given me cause to pause for a second and say Alfresco and who else? Who will be the top CMS vendors in the future.

I have evaluated and been in competition with several CMS vendors both open and closed source in the past, and I believe that Alfresco will become the MySql of the CMS industry. So out of the closed source products which one will win.

I can not say maybe someone out there can let me know their thoughts.

In my opinion in order for any of the remaining CMS/ECM vendors to rise to the top they will need to do the following.

- Provide better licensing. The current license model for most of the ECM/CMS vendors is often difficult to navigate, and even more difficult to expand on. I have had customers in the past want to add more users or more content only to get lost in the license acquisition nightmare that sometimes happens.

- Stop trying to sell, and actually do some customer management. A lot of the issues that come up with CMS implementations and post implementation could be avoided if the sales force did not only come around when they had something "brand new" to sell the client. Come by when you want to show me a new "Included" CMS feature that will encourage me to upgrade, and not one the client has been asking for a long time only to find out in the new version it's there, but for a small 20K fee.

- Start spending time and resources to make your existing product base better. Get rid of bugs that have been around for years, and issues that you have known about. Start spending engineering dollars on development, and new ideas. How much of ever dollar that a customer spends with a traditional vendor actually goes to new development. I bet the number is very low.

- Stop trying to get all your customers to come to some place for a nice event only to be shown a message that does not make sense, and if you pay attention from year to year it is only on very few occasions that the message actually works and is just not more marketing. For the most part these events end up being a feeding frenzy when you try to go from one session to the other with the Account Executives (Sales guys) coming at you from all directions.

- Start having fun, relax, stop living your life from QTR to QTR. Taking this short sided view is what has put the ECM/CMS industry as far behind as it is. When I first started with WCM it was exciting. The people were happy, and everyone tried their best to make the product work. The customers felt the excitement. Now it's just not there from a lot of the vendors.

Anyway these are my thoughts on what another vendor needs to do to compete in what will one day become a 2 or 3 player industry.