Skip to main content

The WCMS Alternatives

An interesting way to portrait what a WCMS is, is by saying what it is not. I tried to do this in my thesis, but ended up with too many WCMS-sisters that either
  • Can be part of the WCMS
  • Can have WCMS bundled inside
  • Is part of the WCM process, or
  • Depending on definition, is a WCMS
So I couldn't really say "This is what WCMS is not:", but ended up with the WCMS alternatives (not really a good title, methinks, but still I think the section helps to explain the WCMS):

To further explain web content management, one can consider what other web content tools and management systems are used today, and what separates these from full WCM systems [Byrne, 2001], [Junco, 2004].


The definitions in use are not clear, and some vendors flag functionality which goes beyond their product. To avoid confusion, these are some of the product families which most often are mixed with the WCMS.

File system

There are various servers or directory services that can be set up to store digital documents and expose them to the Web with the use of a web-server. Even though many of them store content and perform similar tasks to the WCMS, these systems are not complete content management systems. However, file systems form an architectural basis for physical storage in several WCMS implementations.

Weblog

Perhaps the fastest growing channel for content creation is the weblog, more commonly referred to as 'blog'. Weblog systems make it possible for authors in lack of technical skills to publish online content. Recent years have seen an explosion of 'bloggers' appearing [Blood, 2000], and some believe that this form of publishing will continue to grow at such a rate that it eventually will replace communication lines like e-mail and online forums. In spite of its success, the weblog is still a far too simple protocol to be considered anything more than a possible part of a WCMS.

Wiki

Not nearly as widely known as the weblog, the wiki stems from similar communities of developers using the Web for asynchronous communication and collaboration [Cunningham, 2001]. The wiki is a decade old tool allowing developers to create documentation on web-page format, making the documentation easily accessible for viewing and editing. The most famous wiki today is by no doubt Wikipedia [Wikipedia, 2006]. Like the weblog, the wiki is too simple a tool to be considered a WCMS. Some have explored the so-called xanalogical potential of wikis [Di Iorio, 2005], so this may very well change in the future.

Web editing tools

Most web-sites are made manually with the use of HTML-editors. While HTML documents can be made with simple text-editors, many users turn to larger web design tools like Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft Frontpage and Adobe GoLive. These products usually feature WYSIWYG-editing, web-page previews and even synchronization processes for updating web-pages. Strictly speaking, these tools are mere design-tools. They can be used for creating content, but their main purpose is to control the look and feel of the web-design. This does not constitute content management.

Enterprise Content Management

Systems performing enterprise content management (ECM) are typical large scale systems meant for corporations with content throughput of higher magnitude. Some systems like these incorporate their own WCM systems, while other vendors have separated their WCM product from their ECM system [Pelz-Sharp, 2006].

In the industry of content management, the use of this term is largely undetermined. ECM is used for products that do simple content management.

Some WCMS vendors claim their services feature ECM. On the other side of the scale, many lightweight web applications claim to deliver content management when they actually are providing what is by most perceived as web content management, or perhaps merely weblog or wiki functionality. Regardless, in the terms of this thesis, ECM remains something larger than the WCMS, a system able to process the entire digital content flow of an organization.

Digital Asset Management

These systems are developed to handle advanced kinds of media information, like video and images. The market for this kind of software is expected to grow during the next years due to a larger amount of Internet subscribers capable of streaming multimedia due to wider bandwidth. Many WCMS support media types, especially digital images to some extent, but proper digital asset management systems are stand-alone systems [Porter, 2003].

Records Management

Records management (RM) is also referred to as data warehousing. Large quantities of situational and transactional information require special software developed to store information snippets where the number of articles is counted by the million. Some ECM vendors include RM systems in their enterprise solutions, but a WCMS alone is not necessarily linked with an RM solution.

Document Management System

Systems that allow version-management, workflow control, collaboration on documents, digital library and information repositories lie at the core of several content management systems. Some will regard document management systems as software managing scanned digital copies of paper documents. Traditionally these systems were built in-house or proprietary systems, but recently some open source alternatives have started to appear [Gottlieb, 2006]. Like RM solutions, these are not essential for web content management.

Knowledge Management Systems

Foremost, the principles behind knowledge management (KM) take on a more human approach than traditional software engineering [Davenport, 1998]. Even though a knowledge management process will at some point include digital content management, the process as a whole has a nobler end. While the goal of a WCMS is to make content delivery smarter, the knowledge management goal is to make people smarter. Most would agree that a KMS is a suite of processes and tools that includes a variety of computer systems like groupware and generally every kind of management and communication system, including the WCMS.

Web Portal

This is perhaps the most difficult category to separate from the WCMS. The term portal is subject to many interpretations. Some considered it to be a personalized start-point on the Web, displaying bookmarks, news and other select content. The Java Community Process' Portlet definition describes portal (or the compilation of Portlets) as a tool for integrating different content sources into one single page [JCP, 2003].

Regardless of its content, a portal is most easily recognized from its panel-like display, including several windows of various content types. It is both possible to say that a portal is part of the WCMS since it can be used for handling online content. On the other hand one can say that the WCMS is one of the many windows in one portal, one WCMS being simply one of the many data sources integrated in the portal.

CMSWatch defines the difference between a WCMS and a portal as the latter being intended for content delivery, while the former is mainly used for content creation. Still it admits that the tasks of the systems overlap, and that open source WCM systems bear portal similarities [Boye, 2006].

The content landscape

The landscape of alternatives is summarized in the figure above. Note that this is just one simple way to consider the range of content management software in the market today. The horizontal axis represents the goal ranging from delivery to the Web to storage. The vertical axis indicates the size or complexity of the system. This is not accurate overview, and many variations of these systems could have been placed differently.




References:

Blood, R. 2000, "weblogs: a history and perspective" [http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html] Retrieved 30. April, 2006

Boye, J. 2006, "Portals and CMS: What's the difference?" [http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/652-Portals-and-CMS:-What's-the-difference] Retrieved 3. April, 2006

Byrne, T. 2001, "CM vs DM vs KM vs DAM vs SCM vs DRM -- Which One is Right for You?" [http://www.cmswatch.com/Feature/53] Retrieved 3. April, 2006

Cunningham, W., Leuf, B. 2001, The Wiki Way: Collaboration and Sharing on the Internet, Addison-Wesley

Davenport, T. H., Prusak, L. 1998, Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know, Harvard Business School Press

Di Iorio, A., Vitali, F. 2005, "Web authoring: a closed case?", conference proceedings from HICSS-38, IEEE International

Gottlieb, S., Wohlrapp, S. 2006, "Unleashing the Power of Open Source in Document Management" [http://www.optaros.com/wp/wp_6_os_docManagement.shtml] Retrieved 10. April, 2006

JCP - Java Community Process 2003, "JSR 168: Portlet Specification" [http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168] Retrieved 27. April, 2006

Junco, N. L., Bailie, R. A. 2004, "A Case Study of Content Management", conference proceedings from IPCC 2004, IEEE

Pelz-Sharp, A. 2006, " ECM + WCM = ?" [http://doingitbetter.blogspot.com/2006/02/ecm-wcm.html] Retrieved 2. March, 2006

Porter, R. 2003, "What is Digital Asset Management?" [http://its.psu.edu/dmr/dam.html] Retrieved 22. April, 2006

Wikipedia 2006, "About Wikipedia" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia] Retrieved 3. April, 2006

Ps: I take some twisted academic pride in that my only reference to Wikipedia (above) was on the topic of Wikipedia itself :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE  in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched   GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org  - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio