How We Chose Our Web Content Management System

by Robert Kraai 12/30/2011

Once we had the functional specs roughed out along with the rough topology and rough mockups, we needed to settle on a Web Content Management (WCM) system that would meet the needs of our intended scope and budget. We couldn't, in fact, complete the scope and budget without making the choice. This is why it is so critical to have the knowledge of what is available and what directions it is possible to take with a WCM system. This is the point where a typical organization goes through an RFP process or engage a consulting group to gather recommendations and weigh the options. For us the choice was much simpler.

As I mentioned in a previous article, and in my Blog, AceCP already had in mind several options. The Recommendation was a matter of what we could get that might fit within our original rough budget numbers. Like most organizations, we found ourselves looking at a field of different WCM systems with an eye to the possibilities and drawbacks, but unlike other organizations we had prior knowledge to draw upon to help narrow the field. The choice became a short debate with a list of pros and cons, and our choice was quickly narrowed down to two potential options with wildly different potential implementation scenarios.

Consider that the functional specifications for our social marketing experiment included nearly all the social media deliverables (including Blogs, Calendars, Forums, Wiki Pages, Tags, and others), plus back end integration with a marketing workflow product and with SalesForce.com. The site had to integrate with Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In - both from a page basis for site visitors and from a publication bases to post our updates automatically to these sites. Navigation had to be dynamic, and must also support Semantic Navigation features that are built based on how articles and pages are related by tag and topic. In all, the site was defined as a cutting edge and complicated mess of every technology available in the market.

A stack of products rather than a single product was needed to address that kind of progressive set of business requirements. Yet, we felt we were no more demanding of the WCM market than we would expect any customer to be. The only difference between us and a client was agility (we are small with a small set of decision makers) and knowledge (this is our core business, after all). Our WCM choice, just like a clients, had to be validated against our requirements. We could use our knowledge to do this without demonstrations from vendors, RFP responses, or any more research than what we already knew of the industry and products. This is ideally the same services we provide to the clients that hire us to put together their strategy and product choices.

Two of the pitfalls we avoided were making a choice by "industry buzz" and getting talked into a product choice based on an impressive vendor presentation. There would be no influence of our choice other than our own history with the various products. We did not have to worry about whether the consulting company making the choice had our best interest at heart, because we were the consulting company. We always approach our clients in the same manner - specifically as if the decisions were for our own company. Some clients get that, and some do not, but it does not change our dedication to finding the best solution for the circumstances.

Before we started the actual selection process, we needed to identify one extra dimension of the choice that was not in the functional specifications. Since this project was to be a best practice implementation of a WCM with Social Media Marketing, and we wanted to showcase the result, we had to choose a product we would truly recommend to our clients, and that we knew we could create a best practice implementation from (whether that was because we were skilled enough at the technology or because the product had enough to offer that it promoted best practice). In the end, we almost had to compromise this dimension.

The Choices

After taking everything into account, we started the process by laying out all the contenders. A vast majority of the WCM field could be discounted without wasting time, and we simply listed the major products that we support and with which we have enjoyed some degree of success. That list included the following in alphabetical order:

  • Adobe Day CQ
  • Alfresco/Liferay
  • Drupal
  • HP Teamsite
  • OpenText Web Experience Management (WEM or formerly Vignette)
  • OpenText Web Site Management (WSM or formerly RedDot)
  • SharePoint
  • Sitecore

There are many many others in the market, but these comprise the core of what we see most with our clients. We have worked with each one, and have had successful implementations of each in the last few years. This list took about 30 seconds to put together. We knew that each of these has the capability to deliver, to various degrees, everything that we wanted.

It should be noted that Tridian SDL was also originally a thought for inclusion in the list. We have not worked with it before, but have heard good things. Our inquires to them went unanswered, so we did not pursue it. Ektron was also "a thought" based on its growth in the market, but it was not seriously considered based ont eh fact that its only recently started to come together as a full fledged WCM, and we have no experience in it or relationship with Ektron as a company.

Consolidating and Processing Information

The next step was to discuss and comment on each product. We answered general and specific questions and went through thoughts of the technical implementation. Sparring the details, a summary of the major points of this discussion is listed below:

  • Adobe Day CQ
    1. Commercial solid WCM product, and reasonably priced.
    2. Would require some building to get the features we want, and all integration would have to be customized.
    3. This is a product we may recommend to a client.
    4. Adobe, as a company, can be difficult to work with.
    5. Growing in the marketplace.
  • Alfresco/Liferay
    1. Open Source and mainly a collaboration/document product with WCM capability.
    2. Would require a lot of time getting to the features we want, but we have done it before. Liferay makes available some Open Source portlets that bridge the gap. Much coding required, but workable.
    3. Typically recommended to clients with budget constraints looking for less complicated sites or collaboration within the site.
    4. Alfresco is an easy company to work with.
    5. Not much happening with WCM market share.
  • Drupal
    1. Open Source and feature rich, but sketchy roadmap.
    2. PHP Scriptlet is not a desirable environment. APIs to the back end would have to be coded from scratch.
    3. Seldom recommended at this time.
    4. No company to work with.
    5. Growing in the marketplace.
  • HP Teamsite
    1. Commercial product recently acquired by HP, and licensing can be expensive.
    2. A lot of coding and extras required to get this into a Social environment. From a technical standpoint, this is pretty far behind for our purposes.
    3. Seldom recommended to our clients.
    4. We don't have a relationship with HP, but Autonomy was difficult to work with.
    5. Seems to be declining in market share.
  • OpenText Web Experience Management (WEM or formerly Vignette)
    1. Commercial Cadillac of WCMs, and priced accordingly but OT is willing to be competitive.
    2. All the features are there, but still needs some customization to fit our vision.
    3. This is a product we would solidly recommend to a client.
    4. OpenText is easy to work with, as a company.
    5. Declining in the marketplace.
  • OpenText Web Site Management (WSM or formerly RedDot)
    1. Commercial solid WCM product and priced in line for a company our size.
    2. Same community features as WEM, and the same customizations needed. Publication customizations might also have to be done for integration into the marketing workflow that would be more difficult in .Net.
    3. This is a product we'd typically recommend to a company our size.
    4. OpenText is easy to work with, as a company.
    5. Growing slightly or holding steady in the marketplace.
  • SharePoint
    1. Commercial product with a growing install base with pricing that can fit a company our size.
    2. Would require a lot of time getting to the features we want, and presents difficulty in integrating with the Java APIs in the Marketing Workflow. Microsoft has a lot of statements of greatness that don't quite live up to the hype when implementing. .Net environment is not a desirable development environment.
    3. Rarely recommended as a WCM option to our clients.
    4. Microsoft is difficult to work with for this case study.
    5. Growing in the marketplace.
  • Sitecore
    1. Commercial solid product with a lot of features and pricing in line for a company our size.
    2. Much of the development would be in integration and tweaking (much like the OpenText products). .Net environment is not a desirable development environment.
    3. Recommended to clients of our size.
    4. Sitecore is very easy to work with.
    5. Growing in the marketplace.

All the products listed have been or are market leaders in WCM, except for Alfresco (which has a growing demand for its collaboration use). Some products, like Sitecore, scored very high because we had not had a chance to really showcase what we could do on the platform publically before. From this list, we knew that our goals could be met by any one of these.

The First Elimination Round

The following were eliminated based on the product itself:

  1. HP Interwoven has not been doing much lately, and does not have the Social Media focus we need. A lack of social media focus means it's not a good fit for our case study.
  2. Drupal is PHP scriptlet and 100% open source with a roadmap that is not as driven as commercial products. It would not perform well for our upper tier clients, and will not work for the case study.
  3. Sharepoint is a great collaboration product, but lacks the ease of implementation we want for the social media case study. The resources assigned to the case study are mainly Java developers, and the .Net languages might be problematic in connecting with the back end systems we have in place.

The second Elimination Round

Under most client circumstances, this is where the vendor would be tapped to provide demonstrations of their ability to meet the needs and goals of the WCM project. In our case, we did not need that step, so we skipped it.

The following products had different reasons for getting scoped out:

  1. Adobe Day is a great product and had a lot of potential, but when contacting Adobe we had difficulty in getting any kind of response for pricing or questions around the case study. It also did not have the in-depth social media focus that other products already had in place. We might recommend this product more, if Adobe was easier to work with. We eliminated this option due to a lack of response from Adobe.
  2. Sitecore is a great product, and the relationship with the Sitecore company is an easy one for both customers and resellers like AceCP. Sitecore provides the product for free to resellers to use for exactly the kind of case study we are doing. The challenge is in the .Net architecture alone. While we like the product, we could not justify the retooling of our back end systems to accommodate .Net. However, we could see the benefit in Sitecore as a choice, and in fact, it remained in the running as a backup until the final agreements were in place.
  3. OpenText had two options. The first was the former RedDot product now called OpenText Web Site Management or WSM. WSM is a solid product, and shares the Social Media capabilities newly updated within the WEM platform, however it doesn't share the new updates. There was also a concern that the integrations might require more .Net knowledge. The lack of updated social software and the .Net focus eliminated it from the running.
  4. The second OpenText product was the former Vignette suite now called OpenText Web Experience Management or WEM. WEM is what we consider the Cadillac of options, but also has the most horror stories in the market due to the potential of complicating the project with its flexibility. WEM is the product we have the most experience with, and it is a product we truly would recommend to any customer. As mentioned, OpenText is an easy company to work with, and AceCP has a great relationship with them. There are no options for resellers to use the product for case studies for free (like Sitecore and Alfresco), but the cost of maintenance might be justified by the reduction in development cycles. In the end, we eliminated the product from the list due to cost.

Product Selection Take 1

Alfresco is not a Cadillac option, and in fact has a lot of drawbacks in its WCM capabilities. It should fall within the first set eliminated based on the product features. However, what it lacks in structure, it makes up for in it's simple contribution to the end result as a Web based editor of content and documents. If you bolt on the Liferay portal to the front end, and build a custom Portlet driven content presentation using the Spring Surf framework, you can provide almost all the features we desired. The work effort is high in order to make this happen (raising the time and human cost), but we've "been there and done that", so we could borrow from past projects to make it a simpler endeavor. Alfresco provides both a Community "free" version and a Commercial version for use by partners, eliminating some of the necessary budget. Alfresco is also a company that has been easy to work with, and this kind of case study would likely be well supported. While the development would take a while, the actual iterative phases of development would provide the appearance that things were rolling out quite quickly.

We made the decision to go with Alfresco. Final Answer! Or so we thought...

Once our decision was made, and we started to provision the virtual machine environment and get all the software installed. We moved the existing sites over to the new host, and began the design phase of the project. As an iterative process, our first deliverables were small, and we began to work out the problems of putting together the heavily featured site into this somewhat difficult environment.

Product Selection Take 2

Then out of the blue, we got feedback in email that OpenText was interested in our case study. Many times when working with clients on strategy and product choice, we come across factors that were not previously known by anyone during the review phase. Sometimes a vendor that wants the business will make the deal happen. In this case, OpenText changed the playing field with a deal that made the case for changing our final answer. For us, as resellers, it makes more sense to provide the case study on a platform that we'd likely recommend like Day, Sitecore or, our favorite, OpenText WEM.

The process of going through the review and choosing Alfresco took only a few weeks. The Project phases progress for a short while as we addressed the design and the pulling and tugging Alfresco required to get what we wanted from it before OpenText came back to the table. The timing of the OpenText offer during the iterative implementation we use on projects like this allowed us to pull back losing only install work and some prototype code. Content models, Template designs, and other feature design work that was completed could be reworked easily into WEM. Our expectation was for a much more smoothly successful implementation in Open Text WEM, than we'd expect from the Alfresco platform.

Closing

In closing, we evaluated the options quickly, had one false start, and quickly corrected once our ideal platform came within reach. We did not do the choosing and evaluating with an RFP process or any vendor presentations because we have already been through that with our clients many times. Already knowing the features and capabilities of each WCM, our criteria essentially boiled down to time to implement, cost, and ultimately our relationship with the vendor in support of the case study.

Tags:Web Content Management, WCM, Web Content, Project, Best Practice, AceCP Case Study