The Gartner report MarketScope for Web Content Management, 2007 outlines vendors in the Web Content Management sector. The product focus of Web Content Management (WCM) vendors has changed quite a bit over the last two years. Major players in this space tend to be either young and nimble companies that have a primary focus on WCM or else much larger companies, many of whom have products that have been acquired.
Web Content Managment (WCM) has traditionally referred to the ability to create, manage and publish web content composed of text and images. But recently WCM web sites have become increasingly sophisticated, allowing for much greater personalization, multilingual targeted content, and better indexed and cataloged data. To enable these features, sites are increasingly becoming more dynamic in the content that they deliver.
WCM Systems also now typically support workflows between contributors and editors of the web content. The site operation is targeted towards authors and often requires very little support involvement from members of IT.
Backend functionality such as repostory management and library services is increasingly commoditized. The current differentiators and focus for new WCM tools is on the use of metadata and analytics. Rather than focusing on the content itself, the focus has shifted to how people use content.
Very often now, as web sites take on a more social dimension, web site visitors have more opportunities to participate and contribute content to sites. WCM is becoming an enabler for departments to deploy processes that complement training, employee self-service, adverisement insertion, and search engine optimization.
In this report, Gartner reviews 16 vendors. While their Gartner rating matrix has five levels from bad to good: strong negative – caution – promising – positive – strong positive, all vendors reviewed fall into either the promising or positive categories. Only Microsoft received a different rating — caution, and that was because Gartner felt that SharePoint 2007 was, as of yet, a product that doesn’t yet have much of a real world track record.
It seems like one conclusion to draw from the report is that there really aren’t any companies with enough differentiators that allow them to break away from the pack. WCM is an evolving space and one player with a strong vision and execution that can distance itself from the others has not yet emerged.
