Web Content Management, Digital Strategy, Web Design
The Web Content Management Systems market is crowded, competitive, and fast-moving. With so many vendors and solutions, it can be hard to keep on top of all the latest developments, particularly if your job responsibilities are based around only one CMS platform (or a selected few). This review brings together recent highlights from across the industry.
EPiServer and Ektron, two content management system (CMS) vendors acquired by Accel-KKR in December 2014, have merged today to form a single company. The combined company “will operate under the EPiServer name and continue to use the Ektron and EPiServer brands”. For Ektron and EPiServer customers this spells a period of uncertainty. Until the two companies figure out the best way to combine their forces, the product development is destined to take a back seat.
In the web content management space, acquisitions are a fact of business life. About a third of all leading WCM systems are results of past acquisitions. For example, Adobe acquired content management capabilities through Day Software in 2010. Oracle acquired Fatwire in 2011, as well as Stellent in 2006. OpenText acquired Vignette (2009), and also HummingBird (2006), which already owned RedDot at the time. For the customers of the acquired vendor this is not welcome news. Even when an acquisition is successful over the long term, the event still brings a lot of uncertainty in the months following the acquisition. It’s a stressful time, bringing many latent and long-standing issues and questions right to the surface.
JBoye Aarhus 2014 conference brought together nearly 300 delegates from 15 countries. World-class speakers such as Bebo White, Rose Cameron, Eric Karjaluoto, James Cannings, Martin White, Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer, Jake DiMare and Tracy Green, to name just a few, made learning easy and enjoyable. With 12 tracks to choose from there was a lot to take in. Here are just some of the insights from this year’s conference.
Jill Finger Gibson, Marianne Kay, Scott Liewehr, Cathy McKnight, Tim Walters, Ph.D., Tiffany Elliot
The Guide to Service Providers for WCM and CEM (North America) includes:
– Service provider selection best practices
– The myth of software solutions
– Types of service providers: advertising agency, digital/interactive agency, marketing communications agency, systems integrator
– 47 service provider profiles
Jill Finger Gibson, Marianne Kay, Scott Liewehr, Cathy McKnight, Tim Walters, Ph.D., Tiffany Elliot
The Guide to Service Providers for WCM and CEM (Europe) includes:
– Service provider selection best practices
– The myth of software solutions
– Types of service providers: advertising agency, digital/interactive agency, marketing communications agency, systems integrator
– 45 service provider profiles
Adobe Creative Suite – including Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator – becomes a cloud-based subscription service. The products will be branded as CC instead of CS, to reflect the move to the “Creative Cloud”. This is a bold and controversial move, which only an ultimate leader in creative software like Adobe can risk taking.
Personalisation is a vital part of user experience. If done well, it molds volumes of content and data into a concise, meaningful message. It cuts out the annoying irrelevance and makes customer journeys easier. Amazon does it. Facebook does it. Google does it. And so should you! Or at least this is what your customers think. But here’s the problem…
Concrete5 is written in PHP and is often compared to WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. It is best known for its well-implemented in-context editing which makes it easy to use for non-technical web authors, and easy to sell to non-technical stakeholders. Concrete5 can therefore be considered for web projects where end user buy-in is particularly difficult.