What to do when your CMS vendor is acquired?

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. SDL acquired Alterian (2012) and Tridion (2007). The list goes on, with the most recent example being acquisition of Telerik by a global portfolio software company Progress Software.

For the customers of the acquired vendor this … Read more >

The simplest example of effective personalization

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.

Even though most web professionals agree that personalisation is fundamentally important, successful implementations are still few and far between. Large organizations realize the need to personalize, but they also understand the associated costs, complexity, and overhead expenses.

Setting up personalisation … Read more >

Web CMS Quick Take Review: Concrete 5

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.

Concrete5 was released as an open-source CMS in 2008 and has rapidly grown in popularity since. Although the core system is open-source, additional functionality is distributed through Concrete5 marketplace as add-ons. Add-ons are largely commercialized.

Concrete5 aspires to compete with enterprise level systems … Read more >