Category Archives: Featured

Disruptive Shifts in Content Management – Why the mobile app / ipad world is changing the game?

Looking couple of years back, we saw the rapid domination of facebook and twitter in content distribution. The game was all about getting your “page” based content linked and shared out within the content ecosystem.  Link backs and RSS were king. People where using tweet deck as the broadcast mechanism for their articles, blogs, announcements.  This is still goes on, but I believe we are seeing rapid shift in consumption.  People are not just consuming content via browsers like Chrome, Safari, IE, and Firefox.  They are using connected and disconnected apps on ipads, androids,  connected TVs, sms, game consoles, kiosks, car dashboards, personal devices, watches, etc.

However, this rapid and disruptive shift is causing pain in the CMS community.  CMS providers and their customers spent millions automating, managing, tracking, and publishing “web pages and sites.”   For example, large and powerful CMS providers are struggling to adapt their page + template based products with more flexible publishing systems.  For example, many CMS providers are establishing alliances and partnerships with adaptive/screen scrapping technologies like Usablenet and Netbiscuits.   These technologies focus more on the quick and dirty approach of adapting a website to other devices, while not changing the underlining CMS technology.  This approach works from a pure reach perspective, this mean it will allow these CMS solutions to publish to a vast array of devices, but usually sacrifices  the user experience and perceived speed.   Adaptive technologies are very hard to implement when constructing a very native / dynamic / and-or immersive experiences.  For example, if I want to manage content used within an native iOS, Android, and-or Vizio TV application, it will be very hard or next to impossible to use these solutions.  Its less about the page, more about the content API.  More and more developers are demanding content publishing systems that expose assests via REST Json/XML APIs.  This enables pure content distribution across more devices and channels. It is my opinion, the era of the “CMS template” is becoming less relevant in regards to overall CMS need.  I want my content to be semantic, agile, and portable.  This way I can truly use and publish it anywhere.  Therefore, its less about bake vs. fry, its now about an API.

CMS in the Cloud, an opportunity. How will it play out?

The cloud is a very broad term covering many angles from services to infrastructure.  This topic is very relevant within CMS space. Frankly the time to market for many CMS solutions can be large and significant, especially within the Enterprise market-space.  CMS setup, development, customization and cluster maintenance can be very cumbersome to say the least. Members of the CMS community are all familiar with the time and effort to bring a high performance CMS cluster online and support it.    As content consumption patterns shift from traditional web pages to a more multi-channel content  ecosystem (mobile, website, tablets, widgets, game consoles, kiosks, etc), the demand for highly scalable and near real-time CMS will be needed.  The movement to a real-time web will exponential increase resource requirements of CMS solutions as they try to manage more content in a shorter time frame. Innovative CMS solutions will need an agile and flexible home that expands and contracts with shifts in demand due to marketing campaigns, events, and overall increases in consumption . Cloud services from Rackspace and Amazon provide an excellent foundation to establish a CMS foundation.  They allow the ability to quickly allocate space, bandwidth, and instances in direct response to demand.  I am especially interested to see how the traditional vendors like Oracle, Autonomy, Tridion, Sitecore and others address this trend and enable their solutions to quickly be installed and setup within these dynamic Cloud infrastructures.  I see movement from open source community like solutions that combine Drupal, Joomla, Alfresco, Liferay, and others, however big players have yet to show a significant presence. How will it play out? wait and see.. but I see blue ocean possibilities.   -

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