RE: UKNM: who's updating what and how ??

[Robin Grant]

Tarnya wrote:

>how many agencies are still developing and building

>bespoke 'web publishing' systems for clients - as

>opposed to working with content management, personalisation

>and ecommerce software vendors to implement???


wouldn't you like to know!


I would "imagine" (hypothetically, of course) there are several factors

behind agencies not (or persuading their clients to) buying  off the shelf

content management solutions.


1. Price

Most of these products are fairly expensive, and it can be hard to gauge the

real ROI pre-purchase. In SOME CASES it may be cheaper to pay someone to

update the site by hand using a text editor.


2. Immature marketplace

There are a lot of players in this marketplace, of whom only a proportion

will survive. In fact, maybe marketplace is too strong a word - there seem

to be a spectrum of solutions promising very different things. Some common

self-applied labels include: Content Management, Content Publishing,

Application Server, Personalisation Server, Enterprise Web Production... I

could go on. Whatever the label there is no complete solution and massive

overlap.


see:

http://www.perfect.co.uk/do/develop/contentpublishing/ and

http://www.perfect.co.uk/do/develop/applicationservers/

for all the significant players I'm aware of


3. Support

Very few of these vendors have a UK presence (Mediasurface being one of the

notable exceptions), and therefore people *might* be nervous about training

and support options.


4. Model

This relates to point 2., but there are a multitude of different approaches

out there, none of which strike me as the right one (OK, I do like the

http://java.apache.org/cocoon/ model, but that's a while away from being

usable in a commercial context - and Dynamo is nice too, but that is more of

an Application Server and it doesn't do collaborative filtering either - see

http://www.atg.com/). The right approach will emerge over time - but it is

not here yet.


5. Legacy

Many agencies will have started developing their own in house systems years

ago, and may be (justifiably) reluctant to throw that investment away.

Besides, I know of one UK agency's "bespoke 'web publishing' system" which

would wipe the floor with any of the commercially available products...


Both Jupiter and Forrester have produced some reasonable reports which cover

some of these issues - their opinion is probably worth more than mine -

check them out if you have access, and there is a mailing list dedicated to

this topic which can be found at:

http://www.interlog.com/~joeclark/content.html


:)


cheers


Robin

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