Executive

The first thing I did when I sat down to write this article was search the Google Keyword Tools for ‘Proprietary vs. Open Source CMS’. I wanted to see what kind of traffic this article might get. I got 0 searches per month globally.  A flip of the terms to the title I chose nets a whopping 22.  With < 10 in the United States.

My curiosity was piqued, so I checked ‘Open Source CMS’ and ‘Proprietary CMS’ and was not surprised with the 9,900 global searches for the former to 91 for the latter. This is out of 450,000 searches globally for ‘CMS’.

What I am surprised about is that more people aren’t looking for information comparing these two very different approaches to CMS.

All this talk about CXM being DOA has got me thinking about the age old question when it comes to CMS – or software in general for that matter.  Should you try to build the world into your software, or focus on specific capabilities and integrate for the rest?

It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of what the content management industry is calling 'Customer Experience Management', or CXM.  To be clear, I firmly believe that it's important to manage your customer experience.  What I don't believe is that your content management system vendor has the answer.

Yesterday, Robert Rose from Digital Clarity Group posted a great article on CXM. However, I came to very different conclusions based on the facts he described.

I went out for lunch with one of our customers last week. They are one of the largest magazine publishers in Canada and one of the first customers of our Magazine Suite.

I’ll leave real names out of it, but for the purposes of the article, I’ll call my lunch guest Ben. 

Ben is a media entrepreneur. He started a blog that became one of the most popular in Canada which was then bought by said publisher. He is now a VP.

"IT today is supporting more business processes than backend processes.  Today, IT has earned a stake at the table, has gone away from the bits and bytes, and is, more than ever, a partner to the business."

-Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture Ltd., "What's Next for IT?", The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2007.

When open source projects becomes more popular the project leaders often need to increase the time spent on their projects. The increasingly popular Windows-based content management system (CMS), mojoPortal, is no exception to this rule. mojoPortal's project leader, Joe Audette, recently announced on his blog that he is currently making career changes show he can better nurture the mojoPortal project along:

"The best IT execs I've run across are the ones who skip the complaining about management and go in and do a job that seemed impossible in the face of immature technology, indifferent management and throttled budgets."

- Eric Lundquist, "IT success knows no boundaries", eWeek, September 4, 2006

As you may have noticed, we have changed our "IT Quotes of the Week" to "Quoting IT". I found that I do not always come across a good quote worthy of posting here at CMS Report. Also, there are times I just don't have the time to catch up on my trade magazines and the quotes are not really valid this week.