emelar 's Profile

Some of open source's biggest proponents were probably gloating this week over some results from North Bridge Venture Partners' annual open source survey (PDF). Most of the findings weren't terribly prophetic, but there were a few that caught my eye.

Apparently the respondents singled out the content management market as the segment with the highest chance of being turned upside down within the next five years. The drama, however, is well under way, with a cast of thousands being led by companies such as Alfresco, Acquia, and a cottage industry of solution providers pitching Web platforms like Joomla, DotNetNuke, and Drupal.

According to the analyst firm CMS Watch, enterprise content management vendors are failing to meet the security requirements of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).

They claim that, after evaluating a number of ECM technologies, these products are “lacking key security pre-requisites” and are “ill-equipped to meet the security requirements of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)”.

Ouch! say the big boys leaning forward in their leather massage chairs.

“Separating out the SOA hype from the ECM reality remains difficult, as vendors have aggressively positioned their products as SOA-ready – while most are not,” said the report's lead analyst, Alan Pelz-Sharpe. “When vendors talk about SOA, they mostly mean that they have SOAP-enabled their APIs,” added Pelz-Sharpe, “but that's not really the point.”

This is a set of tasks I use to get a feel for the default capabilities of a CMS once I've installed it. I used this set of tasks as a basis for evaluating the features of each CMS in this review. It is by no means a comprehensive test suite, but aims to provide a framework for making quick assessments of CMSs.

The test outlines a set of tasks to build a website similar to the OpenAdvantage website (which I would consider a fairly "average" site). I didn't apply the tasks equally in all cases, as they are not all relevant to all of the CMSs covered; but I used the test when I needed the "flex the muscles" of each system.

To help you navigate the content technologies vendor landscape, we've created this handy map.
To be sure, not all vendor stations are listed, but this should give
you a sense for the major players.

Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) consist of applications used to create, manage, store and deploy content on the Web, including text, graphics, video or audio, an application code. Web Content Management Systems are often a component of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions, and some of these features are represented in the Other ECM Services Layer. However, this pattern is focused specifically on basic web content management services.




This pattern can be viewed in the following layers:



• Interface Layer
  
• Integration Layer
  
• Other ECM Services
  
• The Content Management Layer
  
• Storage Layer