I'm chairing a conference on content management at the moment, thus the flood of CM related posts. One of the topics that has repeatedly come up is web 2.0 and user-generated content in specific. The question was raised: what do content management systems provide in this space? The answer is: not much. There is a significant gap in the ability of CMS products to handle user-generated content. Let's explore this further... Content management systems are fundamentally designed to support a publishing process. That is, people within the organisation produce the original content, it's reviewed and finally published. There is also

In a lot of the work that I'm doing at the moment, I'm seeing very ambitious goals for content management system (CMS) projects. Bundled up in the project are many different capabilities, beyond just page publishing functionality. This is causing a lot of problems. Organisations are going out to market looking for too much, not understanding what CMS products are best designed to do. This leads to a lot of disappointment, as well as blown out budgets. So I thought it might be useful to post a quick summary table listing what a CMS does, and what should be obtained

I've just released an article titled: Does your CMS vendor have product expertise? Following on from that, I would argue that this is now the "ante" for CMS vendor to stay in the game, and will be one of the major differentiating factors in terms of who survives, and who doesn't. To expand on that... Even the big international vendors started from humble roots, and still go through periods of "growing pain" whey they have difficulty supporting their ever-expanding client base. Some vendors have also gained quite a reputation for the difficulty in migrating from one product version to the

Choosing a content management system (CMS) is not just about finding the product with the right functionality. It's also about dealing with a vendor who can support your needs for the lifetime of the solution. You need to be confident that there will be more than just help-desk support - the vendor should offer regular (trouble-free) product upgrades, a clear development plan, and good mechanisms for handling the needs of each CMS customer. The challenge is that many vendors are great at code development, but poor at product management. While they are small this doesn't matter, but as they grow

Scenarios are narrative descriptions or stories that concisely outline how something will work in practice. In the context of a content management system (CMS) project, scenarios are a very effective way of documenting key CMS requirements, and they complement the formal lists of functional requirements typically found in tender documents. Content management scenarios provide a 'day in the life' description of how the CMS will be used, for example: Richard enters the text for the page, and creates a link to the supporting PDF. Once the content has been spell-checked, Richard submits the page for review by Jane, his manager.

“We’re extremely busy, and so are all the other vendors.” This is what I heard from a number of the vendors at the recent Open Publish conference in Sydney. More …

There are a lot of content management system (CMS) products in the marketplace, over 140 in Australia alone. There are new products springing into existence even as this is written. …

All too often, 18-24 month information management strategies fail to deliver benefits, but there is an alternative.

'Personalisation' is a term very much in fashion at present. It is used by vendors to sell their products, and promoted by website and intranet managers as a way of delivering a brave new era of functionality. Separate from debates regarding the merits and approaches to personalisation, there is considerable confusion about the meaning of the word itself. As the use of personalisation spreads, this confusion has grown. Personalisation is now routinely used for everything from 'my links' functionality, to fine-grained targeting of information to specific staff roles. The absence of consistent terminology in this space is now causing considerable

Due to technology improvements, personalisation is a growing feature in both intranet and portal usage. Organisations around the world have already made their first forays into personalisation, however many more organisations are questioning what to personalise and how to go about it. So who is using personalisation and how effective it is? Early in 2007 we ran a worldwide survey to establish the extent that personalisation is being used in intranets and portals. This article discusses the results of the survey, common themes within the survey and some observations on personalisation projects throughout the world. Comments from the survey respondents