I attended the CIDM Best Practices conference in Santa Fe, NM in September. As a new member of the CMS community, working for Author-it, I could not help but notice the apparent need for an evolutionary advancement in the industry.

During the conference, in practically every discussion I had with potential customers, they described their current CM solution as either:
1) A mixture of various vendors’ solutions that required some effort to integrate; or
2) An incomplete solution that still needs components to automate their processes.In most cases, these people did not seem to know about (or understand/accept) the concept of a true “end-to-end solution”. Most of the conference was focused on developing best practice techniques for persuading the rest of the industry (including their own respective organizations) to embrace content management. This was, after all, the intent of the conference. However, there was very little mention of the taxing requirements of CMS integration.

Many people seem very attached to their current multi-vendor solution as they’ve invested a lot of time, money, and sweat into it. In several cases, CIDM presenters described how they began their CMS deployment with at least one restart before they found a solution that actually addressed their respective requirements.

It seems there is an inherent high level of uncertainty in the final result when launching a new CMS solution. This should not be surprising as there is a corresponding high level of integration effort required to deploy a multi-vendor solution. Yet implementation timing is a significant cost variable in any major project. A timely ROI and clear path of achieving it is key to selling the CMS concept at the executive level.

In my opinion, this market must evolve to a more complete solution-based environment before it can substantially proliferate. Much like the networking device industry today, in general, customers prefer a complete end-to-end solution for procurement, product integration, and after-market service reasons. The industry needs to vigorously emphasize technology AND integration as a means to ramp general acceptance.

Posted by Chris Simoneaux, Senior Sales Executive, Author-it Software Corporation