Many of the so called document management apps have web publishing applications which can be bolted on. However for Documentum, which is what I know, it is generally targeted for the large organizations. If you think it might be a market laggard you would be mistaken. Take http://www.sears.com for example. This site was, as of 2003, Documentum managed. The repository contains, as a rumor, over a billion objects.

Also, like you said, there is a lot more to content than html, xml, and jpegs. A lot more…

ASFAIC, I try now to better differentiate acronyms on a per audience and focus basis: Techies vs Practitioners which globally means Horizontal Platforms/Frameworks vs Vertical Tools/Applications/Solutions.

I then consider CMS as being a term used by or for the IT experts. We are usually speaking about “content objects”, “compound documents”; technology-oriented standards (CMIS; JCR; XML, RDF and all the other common content-oriented acronyms), etc. We should then treat any content from a generic horizontal manner. Some content frameworks are putting a stronger focus on publishing services, others on mashability, some others on long term content storage, etc.

There are then all the content enabled applications. These tools are generally being used by practitioners (marketers, librarians, HR, knowledge workers,…). They do not really care what’s running below, if it is enterprise-grade or not and if it supports such or such standards. This is not their job. They just want tools which can boost their productivity in their daily tasks.

Shouldn’t we then better distinct?
- Horizontal (Enterprise-grade or not) Content Platforms (CMP – or let’s use the old CMS name if we do not want to change any existing acronyms). We could also speak of a CEVA Platform. Some others are also imitating ECM to a Platform. What is important is the Platform term.
- Vertical xCM Tools and Solution (WCM, PCM, DMS, etc). But I limit their scope to the Tools and User Experience proposed to the non- or semi-technical end-users.

Coming back to WordPress, this is a lightweight horizontal CMS (considered here as a CMP) with a strong focus on multi-site management and on the presentation service but which still lacks more robust enterprise-grade back-end content management capabilities. In term of application for practitioners (the xCM side), this is a nice Blogging Solution.

I then fully agree with your comments regarding the new CMSWatch classification (here again nothing personal, just debating ). There is a mismatch of audiences which is quite difficult to understand now. With the new Enterprise Information Watch site and reports, does it mean that WCM or Community oriented products are no more enterprise-grade now? Or should we consider such a split as a way to separate public-facing projects from internal-facing initiatives? But then where do you classify all the E2.0 solutions (including IBM Connexions and similar which are quite “enterprise-focused”)?. Does it mean we can not use a WCM to power an Intranet? A better to separation would certainly have been on a per audience basis: technological platforms for techies on one side and applications/solutions for practitioners on the others. They do not speak the same languages with the same terms. They don’t have the same needs nor expectatives.

What is sure is that every content-enabled application can be considered both from a platform/framework and usability/application point of view which is not the case of pure content middleware actors.

Lots more to say on this subject, but I lack some time. More to come soon in a future blog post.

Whatever – the “stealing” part was clearly covered by the ranting disclaimer.

Is there work being done or any thought being given in the CMIS standard to label or group feature sets? Or would that just end up complicating matters?

Here’s how I define the terminology…

Content: information; something that holds meaning.
Content Management: a concept or system for organizing or cataloging content in a meaningful way.
Web Content Management: a system of organizing or cataloging content for the end purpose of being displayed on the internet in a meaningful way.
Enterprise Content Management: a system of organizing or cataloging any type of content across a business enterprise in a meaningful way.

As Bryan Ruby’s comment alluded to the ever changing nature of managing content. I see CMS as the most broad definition; with WCM, ECM or any xCM as a further definition of how and which content is being addressed. Mistakes are made when people think that a WCM and a ECM are one and the same. They are not. While they both are branches of CMS, the serve entirely different purposes and have different feature sets.

Rant or not, I think that it serves as a good litmus test if a person really knows their subject matter. For example, the “CMS implementer” you spoke of would be great to place in my marketing area, but there’s no way I’d hire that person to architect any type of system for integration into my legal department.

Scott Abel convinced me a few years ago on my own blog that the definition of a CMS is never static and always changing. We’re chasing our own tail when we get nit picky in our definitions of a CMS. Somewhere in all the marketing that has been done for terms such as CMS, ECM, and WCM…we have forgotten the difference between information system and information technology.

Whether you’re talking about WordPress, Documentum, Drupal, FileNet, or the thousand other software titles out there…from an information system perspective none of them are really “content management systems”. These applications we keep pushing high on the pedestal are merely tools used to perform the required content management functions in an organization’s information system. In other words, a combination of people, business processes, inputs, outputs, software, etc is all part of the content management system. As organizational needs change so too must the parts that make up the information system including the software.

We could all unanimously agree today what is a CMS and I promise you by tomorrow the evolving needs of businesses and organizations will require we change that definition. Personally, the only way I make sense of terms such as CMS, WCM, ECM is by understanding the business needs of the user. I then use whichever one of the three terms that the user has indicated he/she is most comfortable in using and that’s the only term I use in the rest of the conversation. In other words, I think it’s not the customer that needs educating here but the CMS expert instead. You’re never going to win these people over if you don’t yield to the CMS their organization has already defined for you. Everyone has their “ideal” vision of what a CMS is and isn’t and most often the term is defined in the context of organizational behavior and not on a web page.

I take it the issue arises out of the convergence of two different ‘markets’ or ‘industries’.
From my experience hacking around the internets, putting up websites for friends and the occassional freelance project, I have heard the term CMS as in (Web)Content Magement System used for years to refer to platforms/products such as Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, phpNuke, etc…. essentially, low-end, open-source tools that make the Content of a Website more dynamic and easier for the non-technical user to update. (To be sure there are non-opensource, enterprise WCM solutions out there offered by real companies with real support; I have little experience with them).

In the Enterprise Content Management world (where I live today), Web Content Management (WCM/WEM) is a sub-set of Enterprise Content Management (ECM).

I’m curious about your experienced “CMS” implementer; which platforms were they experienced with? Sounds like they would fall in the first camp of wCMS implementer and probably had no experience with platforms like Sharepoint, Documentum, Filenet, etc.

I understand your frustration, but when I’m talking to someone about managing a website or internet application and they use the phrase CMS I understand the context.

As an ECM representative, I hear the term “CMS” used rarely and always in one of 2 contexts. The first, being used as part of a broad reference title to a corporate ECM initiative, and second in a departmental discussion with ‘the web group’ when they are referring to whatever WCM/wCMS tool they are using. In either case, I don’t try to correct them or educate them on the terminology. When in Rome.

>”To whome does the term belong? That is a topic for another day.”
I think this battle is already lost, I think the web-world pwns the term.

~Brian

ECM – Enterprise Content Management = overarching strategy as part of information management strategy – not a system

next layer down….

CMT’s – Content Management Technologies – the family of often specialized technologies, solutions and products that are used to create, edit, manage, store and publish various types of content in various business contexts

next layer down…….

WCMS, EDMS, ERMS, EDRMS, CCMS, WEMS, blah blah blah…………..

However as we can wax lyrical in your blog comments but we cannot force the world at large to adopt whatever ‘we’ agree on – I fear your going to be loosing your cool over this issue for some time to come……