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Interview : Seth Gottlieb, founder andprincipal of Content Here
Hello readers!Today is a new interview day!I interview
Seth Gottlieb founder and principal of Content Here.Hello Seth!First of all, many thanks for the time you are spending to answer this interview.Seth, you have recently created Content Here.Could you present it? What's the purpose and objectives? What kind of services do youoffer?Content Her
is a vendor-neutral analyst and consulting firm with a focus on contentmanagement technologies. Most of my work is helping clients evaluate and select webcontent management systems. Many of my clients are from the media and publishing industry but I also work with higher education, technology, and government.I startedContent Hereto fill a large gap between analyst firms and systemsintegrators. I was not satisfied with the level of depth provided by most analyst firms andsystems integrators cannot realistically keep up with enough products to give a vendor neutralrecommendation of which one to use. In order to know a technology to reliably implement it,you need to keep your focus. Content Hereis a compromise between those extremes. My
implementation background helps me understand how the different platforms work and myfocus on selection helps me from getting too immersed in any one system. I also have anetwork of systems integrators that I regularly get briefings from so I can hear their war stories and successes.
And you what's your role and what are you doing day after day?
Content Hereis a one man show so I do everything. I spend a lot of time keeping upwith the 50 or so technologies that I follow. That includes connecting with my network of systems integrators, playing around with the technologies when I am able, and getting demoswhen I can't get access to the software. I have a well defined process for taking a clientthrough a software selection and I do roughly 12 of those per year. I also have some longer term projects where I advise clients as they progress along a roadmap of implementing andenhancing their solution.Another exciting part of my job is writing reports. I have one report out calledOpenSource Web Content Management in Javathat I wrote last year. This summer I will releaseand updated version. I am also working on a new report that focuses on web contentmanagement for media and publishers.
Interview : Seth Gottlieb, founder andprincipal of Content Here
Let's talk about Content Management.I followed you since I'm working and I learned a lot of things with you and your blog.Could you identify the (hi)story of content management based on your experience ?What was the main trend?
I have been working in content management for the better part of the last 14 years. Myfirst exposure was at a research company that turned out around 800 reports per week. Thekey challenges then were workflow and managing the repository so that the researchers couldleverage what had been written before. My next job was with a Internet consultancy wheremy first project was to implement Vignette for a very large computer company. Since then, Ihave implemented many content management platforms. In fact, I rarely had the luxury of implementing a system more than once.As for the industry as a whole, things have been much more chaotic - especially on theweb content management side. On the document management (or ECM) side, the industry hasfollowed more typical path of leadership by big companies (EMC, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft).On the WCM side, no one appears to be dominating and the companies there is not enoughattrition. As a result, the industry is fragmented. Maybe the current economic climate willchange that but who knows. One of the things that hurt the upper tier WCM players was their interest in competing in the ECM space and their loss of focus on WCM at precisely thewrong time - when the Web 2.0 momentum was starting to build. If they were leaders beforeWeb 2.0, failure to react to this new wave of innovation made them lose their leadership position. The pure play WCM companies were able to respond and capitalize on newfunctionality and opportunities much better than the ECM aspirants.
And finally we have ECM! Can you tell us more about the difference between ECM andWCM?
When ECM was positioned as the union of all forms of content management, I was pretty vocal in my skepticism. I thought it was unrealistic to expect one system to uniformlyhandle all four content management disciplines: web content management, documentmanagement, records management, and digital asset management. Even if one system could be designed, it would be impossible for a customer to implement and manage a single solutionthat made every group happy. How would you manage the competing interests of the legalcontracts team and the marketing team? If you could abstract your model to the level that itapplied to both these business domains, would it make any sense? Also, the documentmanagement companies didn't understand that web content management is more thandeploying a bunch of documents to the doc root of a web server.I can live with the more modest vision that ECM has become: the management of theinformation assets that are used to run an enterprise. In practical terms, what this really meansis document management plus process and governance. I say documents because documentshave been the de-facto currency of information within companies since the invention of themanilla folder. I am happy to see that tradition change with document-less collaboration toolslike wikis and I think that it would be wise for ECM to keep up with the evolution of how weshare information.
Interview : Seth Gottlieb, founder andprincipal of Content Here
I think of web content management as tools that manage a website (or a collection of websites). In addition to managing the information itself, a web content management systemmanages the organization, layout, and branding of the information. Web content managementsystems also control the visitor facing interaction with that information.
Throughout this history, has content management project evolved? In functionaldomain is there the same or have you noticed an evolution? Is it possible to illustrate itwith your own project experience?
As an insider, I see lots of different and exciting trends like AJAX enable contributor interfaces, user generated content, and faceted navigation and other ways to enrich the user experience. I am also excited by social media and its ability to create a dialog *around* thecontent. Content is turning from a static informational asset to an exchange of information.Finally, thanks to services like Delicous and Flickr, the average user is starting to see thevalue of tagging. I think that it is great that RSS is becoming so ubiquitous.On the down side, I am also surprised by the lack of progress. Most companiesmanage their web content in Word documents passed around as email attachments. It is notuntil *the end* of the workflow that the content gets into the CMS. Of course, thatundermines all the workflow that has been configured in the system. I think that is changing but I expected it to happen faster. One thing that is helping facilitate the change is that thetechnologies are getting less formal and rigid about process. They are better designed for theaverage knowledge worker who is more exception driven rather than process driven.From a publishing perspective, I am very interested in the monetization of content.Something new has to supplement the flaws in the traditional banner advertising model - in particular, in syndication and on small-screened mobile devices.
What's your pronostic for 2009 in content management area (functionnality andtechnology)? Only products based on Standard (CMIS for example)? Ajax only? RIA?
I think that user interfaces are going to continue to leverage AJAX. In 2007 many products started to use drag and drop for ordering of assets. In 2008 we started to see drag anddrop linking and image placement. We will probably see more of that. I am also interested inthicker clients. For example, one of my customers has a custom built WCM platform and theUI is all in Flex which makes it amazingly responsive for assembling packages of content.One thing that would be really great is a Flash-based WYSIWYG editor. Nuxeo is also doinginteresting things with their RCP client.I think that REST based API's will facilitate content integration and customers willdemand more functionality in the APIs. Alfresco's web scripts is a great model.As for CMIS, I would like to see that become a standard before I get too excited aboutit.
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