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Customer Data Platforms Web Content Management

November Updates

MACH and J. Boye social night in Toronto – November 21st. I will be in Toronto on November 21st. to attend a J. Boye CMS Experts group in person. It has been quite some time since I’ve been to one, so I’m looking forward to seeing Janus and friends. Following this event, we’ll be at […]

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Customer Data Platforms Customer Experience Web Content Management

2020 Year in review (Part 1)

Clearly, 2020 has been a year unlike any other (at least in my working lifetime). Interestingly, while the “real world” has been turned upside down by the covid-19 pandemic, much of the marketing technology landscape remains either unchanged, or accelerated. Let’s start by looking back… 2020 predictions revisited In September 2019, I wrote a post […]

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Web Content Management

The “moats” in WCM are drying up

Warren Buffet famously spoke of “economic moats” when investing in companies. The idea being there are “defensible” competitive advantages to that company which make it difficult for newer players to compete. An example would be the massive network effects of Facebook, or the warehousing, delivery and logistical capabilities of Amazon. Morningstar, the stock rating agency, […]

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Web Content Management

The three types of SaaS vendors in WCM*

Everyone should be familiar with this slide – it is used by almost every vendor to compare different offerings (either within their own offerings, or as a way to differentiate from competitors). I happen to be using a version from BMC software, but any search for “SaaS vs. IaaS vs. PaaS” would pull up hundreds […]

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Web Content Management

Inherent conflicts in Web Content Management – Part 1: Visual design vs. Structured content

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single user in possession of a good CMS must be in want of a better CMS. (Yours truly – with apologies to Charlotte Brontë) I wrote last week on the topic of user satisfaction in WCM and how complicated it is to categorize and evaluate underlying data […]

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Web Content Management

On the definition of “satisfaction” in Web Content Management systems (it’s complicated)

Dries Buytaert (creator of Drupal and CTO at Acquia) posted this tweet regarding the relationship between user experience and sentiment regarding Drupal: I replied that unlike what the graphic indicated, we actually saw similar results in our research at Sitecore, and that much of this echos what Tony Byrne saw when he described a “Drupal-like […]

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Web Content Management

Things that are almost, but not quite, WCM: The extended family

When I wrote my post “Should “Web Content Management” even exist as a category anymore?” I got some feedback from Jake Wilund the Product Manager responsible for the Acquia Content Cloud offering in the works, asking if I should have included Content Marketing Platforms – which is astute, given that CMP is in many ways […]

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Web Content Management

Salesforce CMS now out of beta

First reported at TechTarget: “Salesforce CMS now generally available” the release coincided with the overall Salesforce Winter ’20 update. So what does this mean in practice, particularly for Sitecore customers, where they have had a “strategic partnership” with Salesforce for two years. First, this is not unexpected – the CMS beta and roadmap had been […]

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Web Content Management

Should “Web Content Management” even exist as a category anymore?

One of the challenges facing customers and analysts (and vendors!) is the ever-changing definition of what a Web Content Management system even is. Tony Byrne has discussed this fragmentation in some detail. In particular, I like his characterization of “products” (which often do one thing well) vs. “platforms” (which often don’t do a single task […]

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Web Content Management

WCM systems are the hot new billionaire status symbol of 2019

Marc Benioff personally owns Time Magazine and via Salesforce Ventures, has a few million dollars invested in various WCM companies, including Bloomreach, Contentful and now $12 million in Automattic (Benioff owns 4% of Salesforce shares and they made a $300 million investment in Automattic). That may seem like a lot, but it pales in comparison […]