Abstract Edge: Brand Interactivism

Gartner's WCMS Magic Quadrant is Unfair to Open Source

This week, Gartner released their "Magic Quadrant" study of the web content management system market.

"This Magic Quadrant will help CIOs, and business and IT leaders that are analyzing their Web strategies to assess whether they have the right WCM offering to support them."

While acknowledging the "increased popularity and traction for open-source offerings," once again Gartner has failed to include any open source CMS's in the report. The reason, Gartner claims, is:

"Open source still accounts for less than 4% of the revenue by which Gartner defines the size of the WCM market. This percentage is growing slowly, based on the inherent licensing models used for the offerings. This year, no vendors offering open-source software (OSS) have reached the revenue threshold for inclusion in our formal analysis."

Later in this article, Gartner clarifies the revenue threshold, stating:

"WCM total software revenue (including new licenses, updates, maintenance and/or subscriptions, SaaS, hosting and technical support) for 2008 must exceed $8 million. The software must be available as a stand-alone product or offering."

The thing is, this is entirely unfair. One of the major advantages of open source software is that licenses are free, as in $0, as in no revenue whatsoever. So basically, Gartner is punishing open source software for this. For the most part, open source software only costs money for maintenance, hosting and technical support. Licenses and updates, which in the CMS world can cost a small fortune, cost nothing at all when using open source software.

In my opinion, vendor revenue is a particularly poor metric for evaluating whether businesses "have the right WCM offering to support them."

What do you think? Anyone from Gartner care to comment? Is vendor revenue a reasonable measure in a software market where there are an abundance of open source solutions?

Time to Reconsider the Open Source CMS

Henry Donahue, Discover Magazine's esteemed CEO (disclosure: Discover is a client of Abstract Edge), has written on Folio some of his impressions of using the open source CMS Plone over the last couple of years.

From the full article:

Based on my conversations at trade events, however, many publishers still struggle with the basic issue of getting content online in a way that is timely, efficient and interactive.  On top of that, the twin financial and publishing crises make it unlikely that anyone can round up the capital to do a 1999-style $5 million custom CMS development.

Enter the open source content management system.

At Discover, we went with Plone, which was recommended by our outside developers and seemed to combine a simple, intuitive platform with a robust open source development community.  You can read a case study about our March 2007 launch here at the Plone site.

Almost three years later, here are my takeaways on our open source experience...

It makes my week when a client publicly proclaims satisfaction. He also brings up a key point. During this time when everyone is trying to figure out a way to save every dollar, open source solutions sure bring a lot of value to the table.

Search is Easy, But Good Search is Hard

I'm knee-deep in a search-related project. No, I don't mean search engine optimization (SEO) like trying to improve organic rankings on Google or Yahoo. I don't mean search engine marketing (SEM) or pay-per-click advertising such as Google Adwords.

I mean developing a search engine that will help users of a website find relevant content. It's not a trivial problem, but it's interesting. As we develop this out, I intend to post some of our thinking here.

In the meantime, I saw an article about search issues on Facebook today and thought it relevant, especially considering it's election day.

World Science Festival A Big Success

Some of the greatest scientific minds of this generation have converged on New York City this weekend to participate in the World Science Festival. Apparently, nearly every ticket has been sold, making this inaugural event a huge success.

I had the privilege of attending the festival's kickoff event at the American Museum of Natural History on Wednesday night, a result of Abstract Edge having built the festival's website (hat tip to our friends at Six Feet Up who collaborated on the development.) The site was built using the open source Plone content management system. For those who believe that all Plone sites look alike, here is yet another example to disprove that theory! Even the Flash elements on the homepage can be managed by content editors inside of Plone.

The CMS allows WSF staff to keep all of the information about events, speakers, locations, etc. up to date. Site visitors can easily browse and search for events that may pique their interest. Plone automatically keeps track of the relationships between the events, participants, locations, and ticket purchasing. This was critical in helping WSF manage the constantly changing festival information.

So, if you happen to be in New York this weekend, take a look at the site and see if anything is still available. The early reviews are quite positive!

Here are some links:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/arts/30fest.html?ref=science
http://blogs.forbes.com/digitaldownload/2008/05/world-science-f.html
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/media_events/science_festival_kickoff_party_a_whale_of_a_time_85880.asp

(this last one is about the cool party I got to attend...)

Plone CMS: A Non-Technical Introduction

The Frugalist does a very nice job of introducing the open source Plone content management system to non-technical folks.

Some of the reasons why [open source] is very important to you are:

• the developers created this software for their own daily use, in the real world
• these technologies are NOT developed and  licensed as commercial products
• by necessity this software is tested brutally and errors tend to get fixed quickly
• you are never tied exclusively to any one vendor or company
• the system is completely customizable and scalable to meet your future needs
• complete standards compliance means your site will stay current and viable

Plone: Application or Framework? Should We Care?

For a bunch of years now I have heard a debate within the Plone community, most notably from Paul Everitt, about whether Plone is an application or a framework. While I can't honestly say I've given the issue a ton of my time, nor am I sure I fully understand why this is a particularly important distinction, I did have one thought on the matter I wanted to share.

To me, Plone is an application.

Plone is also a framework.

Yes, that's right - it's both!

I wonder if this question is akin to asking if light is a particle or a wave. So, which is it? Well, it depends on what kind of experiment you run. This Wikipedia article explains this issue better than I could, but in the end it's all about context. Or maybe it's about the inadequacy of trying to use simplistic mental models for complex things. In either case, Plone is a framework when you need to use a framework, and it's an application when you need to use a CMS application.

I suspect this is really more of a marketing issue in Paul's view (Paul - am I right about this?) which I suppose does make it less academic. Marketing 101 tells us that you want to pick something where you (or your product or your service) are the best in the marketplace, point to that, and sell, sell, sell. You shouldn't try to be everything to everybody.

As far as this particular issue goes, it is clearly in some people's best interests to position Plone as a framework, and in other people's best interests to position Plone as an application.

So, let the public debate begin!

1. Why is this important?
2. Why should Plone be positioned as an application? What does that even mean?
3. Why should Plone be positioned as a framework? What does that even mean?
4. Is there any reason not to speak of Plone as one or the other?
5. Is this discussion worth having?

Founding Meeting of the Plone NYC Users Group

Thank you to Robert Burgoyne for organizing a brand new New York City Plone Users Group. There have been one or two similar efforts in previous years that didn't really go very far, but I think that with Plone's current momentum in the open source CMS world, we may have reached a tipping point for success.

Anybody interested can sign up at http://plone.meetup.com/4/. The first meeting will be tomorrow evening, Thursday, November 8th at 7pm and will take place at:

Office of Silver Leaf Partners, LLC

420 Lexington Ave, Suite 2225

New York, NY 10170

212-542-3144 x3

I hope to see you there!

Ongoing Coverage of the Plone Conference

I'm going to leaving for the airport shortly, but wanted to post links to a few more of the reports I wrote for CMSWire about the Plone Conference:

• Plone Application Development Patterns

Sally Kleinfeldt from the Nature Conservancy gave a talk about the ways their organization approached Plone development for their custom application development.

• Plone Wisely: Our Time is Valuable

Our time is valuable. Why waste it by trying hammer a square peg in a round hole? Pick the right tools for the right job and let Plone do the things it is good at.

• Project Management of Smaller Plone Projects

Veda Williams, a project manager at One/Northwest who manages many a Plone implementation, gave us all here at the conference some advice on best practices for managing smaller Plone Web content management projects.

I found a lot of her presentation extremely familiar, as it meshed very well with my own experiences, and frankly, it all applies to any tech project, not just Plone.

Help to Raise Awareness of Plone With Digg

The Plone Conference presents an especially good opportunity to raise awareness of the product, platform, and community, that is Plone. I'm trying to do my part by blogging about the conference both here and at CMSWire.

If you would like to help with this effort, one way you can help would be to "Digg" the CMSWire coverage. By clicking on the little "thumbs up" icon you will move this page up in the Digg lists. I know from first-hand experience that Digg can generate tremendous traffic. In fact, roughly 40% of Discover Magazine's total traffic comes from social networking sites like Digg and Reddit.

Christian Scholz makes a great point though:

But please everybody: Be careful with commenting a la "Plone is great/fantastic/best thing since sliced bread" all the time. This is mostly seen as spam. You might add comments with more content maybe. Or you might answer other people's comments or questions. As said with commenting in the earlier mail, just try to engage in some conversation.

The State of Plone

My last couple of posts just went live on CMSWire about a couple of talks given regarding the overall state of Plone.

The first entry describes Paul Everitt's discussion of what's been going on with the Plone Foundation over the last year. Highlights include:

• The Foundation completely (more or less) owns the worldwide trademarks for "Plone"
• Plone.net has launched - a site with the mission of presenting marketing/business information about Plone to decision makers. This is important so business folks don't have to wade through all sorts of boring technical stuff on plone.org
• Some new marketing, community and protection efforts will soon start and will be paid for by Foundation sponsorships. One benefit of sponsorship will be prominent display on plone.net.

The second entry covers the Plone Conference Keynote delivered by Plone founders Alex Limi and Alan Runyan. A special thank you to the two of them for specifically calling out our work with Discover Magazine, and especially thank you to Alan for calling it "an unbelievably gorgeous site."