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The Central Office of Information (COI) is the UK Government's centre of excellence for marketing and communications. They have just published a report on the costs, usability and quality of selected UK Government websites in 2009-10.

It's a detailed report and the data is available to download. It shows how the UK Government spent £94 million on website development and running costs plus £32 million on web staff in 2009 - 2010. By looking at the analytics it's possible to correlate the costs of building these sites with the number of visitors. One headline statistic was that the UK Trade and Investment website averaged 28,000 users per month but cost over £4 million to build - so each site visitor cost £11.78. 

As an exercise, I took a deeper look at the websites in the COI report to see what technology they're using. These are leading central government websites so it's an interesting sample.

I wanted to characterise the sites from the information available on the Internet - were they built using Microsoft technology as evidenced by IIS web server, ASP.NET framework and Windows Server? Or were they Open Source based, with Linux OS and Apache web server for example?

In the end I extracted data for 38 of the websites, and found 25 were using Microsoft and 13 were Open Source. The majority of the Microsoft sites were running Windows Server 2003, with one instance each of 2000 and 2008.

That in itself bucks a global trend, in that over 60% of all websites are based on Apache whereas IIS 5, 6 and 7 account for 1%, 20% and 3% respectively. Microsoft and its partners have clearly had a strong influence over UK Government procurement decisions.

How much evidence was there of Content Management Systems (CMS) usage? Very little. There was a small pocket of Vignette CMS (now owned by Open Text), some Drupal and Joomla, and one instance of Microsoft SharePoint 2007. There was a weak correlation between the age of the site and use of CMS - it's more common in recently published web sites.

Were the Microsoft based websites more expensive than the Open Source based ones? I ran a non-parametric statistical test (Mann-Whitney) on the two samples and the short answer is that there's no significant difference. This shows that the overall costs of building these sites out-stripped the licensing costs.

Do these sites seem like good value for the UK taxpayer? At an average non-staff cost of £2.5 million per website, absolutely not. I read the report many times to understand how HM Revenue and Customs could spend £35 million on www.businesslink.gov.uk. I just can't figure out how.

What's the lesson? The licensing model of the underlying technology isn't a significant factor in determining website costs. Free & Open Source Software won't matter when a Consultancy or Outsourcing company loads up a contract with tasks requiring many person weeks of expensive billable time.

If there isn't a FOSS advantage, there's still clearly a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) advantage. One of the main purposes of these sites (apart from serving static information pages) is to provide a portal for file download.

Commercial open source software packages such as CogniDox allow you to do this in a completely secure and flexible manner. It costs thousands of pounds, not millions, and it delivers those features out of the box. And it has competitors such as Alfresco and Nuxeo that can also do the same.

CMS Watch is a great site for learning about document management, web content management, enterprise content management, enterprise portals, web analytics, and enterprise search solutions. It's mandatory reading for those of us making products, and definitely worth the time of any buyer who needs to select a product in this area.

This week they published their predictions for what is likely to happen in 2010. They were also brave and smart enough to assess how well their 2009 predictions fared.

Selectively looking at some of their 2009 outcomes, they probably got it right that Open Source ECM made advances and that social computing diffused into the Enterprise. I think they got it more wrong than they admit on SharePoint being derailed by Office 14  - the interest continued unabated and the beta of SharePoint 2010 did it no harm either.

They predicted that SaaS vendors would expand offerings. There was plenty of activity in the SaaS sector but many buyers are still unconvinced about putting company documents on a third party server. A term of service from a SaaS provider looked at recently is not uncommon: "Once you cancel or terminate your registration with us, we will instantly delete data, content, text, documents, images and information from the service. After the cancellation of the service, all of your content will be lost for ever." Data lock-in as a variant on vendor lock-in, and just as dangerous. 

For 2010, CMS Watch makes some predictions that we can compare and assess in regard to CogniDox.

For example, "Enterprise Content Management and Document Management will go their separate ways" (#1) gets our agreement. There is a tension between providing good workflow tools for document management and the tools used for website publishing. Clearly they need to be compatible and work in unision at some point but doing both in one application isn't necessarily the best idea. Given that prediction, their "Document Services will become an integrated part of ECM" (#8) may seem to be a contradiction. Ignoring that, we'd agree that helping users to automate the production of documents will be helpful and important. We tend to describe this as "document assembly" which I think is a more specific and useful term for e.g. creating a new legal document using metadata to populate key fields.

We'd also agree that "Faceted search will pervade enterprise applications" (#2). They mention Lucene/Solr, which we support in CogniDox 8.0 onwards, but we'd also mention the Xapian open source search engine library and the Flax Search Service as a technology to watch. CMS Watch only mentions SharePoint in the context of "Digital Asset Management vendors will focus on SharePoint integration over geographic expansion" (#3) which may be overly specific - most ECM and WCM companies will consider offering a SharePoint connector. That doesn't however imply that SharePoint is any more than a workgroup Intranet builder with file sharing capability. Buying decisions may verge on the ridiculous - why pay $$ for SharePoint user licenses and then add $$$$ for a proprietary ECM add-on? But SharePoint 2010 will be a force, and we can anticipate a rush on products that see themselves as SharePoint 'killers'.

One thing that correlates with ECM suites and SharePoint is that they can bring hidden costs in hardware / server requirements and the IT admin effort inherent in their client/server architectures. For that reason we'd agree that "Enterprises will lead thick client backlash" (#6) and to a lesser extent that "Cloud alternatives will become pervasive" (#7). Some of the same issues faced in 2008/9 for SaaS still remain.

We'd strongly agree that "Gadgets and Widgets will sweep the Portal world" (#9). People have become accustomed to seeing them on the public web at sites like iGoogle and they will become the definitive user interface for the Intranet. The only question is what widgets are the most essential?

The prediction that "Mobile will come of age for Document Management and Enterprise Search" (#4) depends on what is meant by "coming of age". It will certainly be the case that this will grow from the current small base, but we think this is one for 2011 instead.

That leaves 4 other predictions we have not commented on, and so a quick visit to CMS Watch to read these for yourself is recommended.

The 2009 edition of the Open Source CMS Market Share Report was released today by the water&stone digital agency.  A free copy of the survey can be downloaded from CMSwire at http://www.cmswire.com/downloads/cms-market-share/

Ric Shreves, who has led the reporting on this and previous editions in 2007 and 2008, has developed a very thorough and clever method for analysing the market share of an open source product or project. You can't just use company financial data because the software is downloaded for free, so he has developed an arsenal of metrics ranging from number of downloads to the level of community actvity around the product. He uses these to order the products in terms of their usage and mindshare.

A CMS (it stands for Content Management System) is software used for creating Enterprise web sites and for uploading content such as news, blogs, documents; or any unstructured information content, without requiring technical knowledge of web site design. An analogy is sometimes made with the introduction of the Caxton printing press - without one you couldn't successfully enter the new printing industry. Today, you can't keep up with the creation and update of web sites without the modern equivalent - the CMS.

At the risk of offending my web designer colleagues, it can sometimes seem that every web design company out there offers it's own CMS. But the ones in this report are much more complex in nature, with a wide array of features.

The highlights are that Joomla!, Drupal and Wordpress are the most commonly used (in that order); and that there is a gulf of usage between these and the rest. Although Joomla! was the most used, it only came 5th in response to the question of how much people approved of it.

I think one problem with the report is that there is a difference in the type of company that chooses to use Wordpress rather than Joomla! or Drupal. Wordpress is easy to install and use, and it is therefore excellent for a one-person company that needs to get started quickly. Joomla! and Drupal typically need server installation skills but they do offer myriad features and add-on extensions, either free or low cost. This blog for example is produced by an extension called MyBlog from Azrul.com. The website is built using Joomla! 1.5 and the blog creation is a component like any other.

We also use Joomla! for the customer portal sites we create - CogniDox provides content from the document repository and we can add-on other components such as a customer trouble ticketing system by adding extensions.

I'm pleased to see Joomla! do so well in this report. It hasn't been getting as much press as Drupal recently, mostly because there are now companies offering Drupal support, and they have (quite rightly) promoted the tool along with their capabilities. There is still room for improvement on that front, but Joomla! is an excellent CMS.

Recently, I got around to reading the AIIM "State of the ECM Industry 2009" report published at the end of March. It's based on a survey of 568 respondents, with a majority (52%) from large organizations (1000+ employees). There was a high percentage (21%) of people from the local and national Government sector, and there was a distinct US & Canada (61%) skew.

What struck me about the report was that it could be seen as a prescription for smaller companies and startups, along the lines "This is what big companies don't like about themselves, you have an opportunity to do it differently". After all, one of the good things about a new startup is that you don't have to make the same mistakes.

It's easy to say, harder to do, but in my experience the degree of "start as you mean to go on" that smaller companies can muster is a good way to keep the growth curve as accelerated and smooth as possible. When you have to switch-in a new process or workflow, it can be a massively disruptive force at a time when you can least afford disruption. Of course, cost is a factor - many a person has left behind an expensive ERP system at their former company, unable to replace it in their new startup. But with the growing availability of Free and Open Source software packages, that isn't the only factor any more.

So what ails the larger Enterprise in their Content Management, and how can SMEs adapt this as guidelines for a better strategy?

By inverting the AIIM ECM findings, I'd say they are:

(1) Start with a low-cost strategy and keep to it - never think that you will switch to an expensive solution at some point in the future. Make other requirements such as compliance and legal discovery a sub-set of the cost saving requirement.

(2) Treat e-mail usage as a dangerous drug - if you become over-dependent you will find it impossible and/or expensive to quit. If e-mail attachments become the main method for communication, it will get out of control more quickly than you'd prefer.

(3) Don't allow documents to be buried. It isn't enough that it was ready by the deadline and reviewed at the meeting. It also has to be just as easy to find in 6 months time.

(4) Beware multiple solutions. It's easier to let two teams 'go their own way', but then very hard to re-integrate them. Keep asking why does it need to be different and whether anything can be done to integrate them across the top.

(5) Don't abdicate business solution decisions to IT only (even when it is a part time role done by one of the engineers or founders). This is as important as all your other strategic decisions, and it will have a very significant impact on your company culture.

(6) Get support directly from vendors rather than consultants. They have up-to-date knowledge and it is in keeping with low-cost guideline #1.

(7) Enterprise content will become a large repository quicker than you think, so the earlier you start to think about Enterprise search, the better.

(8) Blogs and wikis are useful, but remember they are content too and will need to be included in your records management.

I'm hardly neutral on this topic, but I don't see or accept why any startup or small company cannot develop a short strategy paper that sets out their business solutions needs and priorities. If they can't afford Oracle or SAP using third party implementers at this stage, it is totally not a problem. In fact, guideline #1 says it would be better to find an open source alternative.

A month or so back one of the CMS vendors (Day Software AG) posted a blog entry in which they invited (as in the game of ‘Tag') a number of other CMS vendors to rate themselves on a 15-item checklist. They had some reactions from the tagged vendors, and other vendors thought it was interesting and responded anyway.

Most bloggers who responded did so in a frank and open manner, which is refreshing. Even the instigators of the checklist didn't pick questions that would yield them a perfect 45 score. However, there was a fairly wide breadth of interpretation in some of the answers and I was left with the impression that the scores weren't really on an interval scale, but were at best ordinal data. Nevertheless, it is fascinating reading for anyone who is looking at Which?CMS.

Compared to the publicly-listed and major-player enterprise software companies on the list of responders, I approached the CogniDox answers with some trepidation. My first conclusion was similar to that from KnowledgeTree and Nuxeo - we are more of a DMS product than a CMS or WCM, so some questions didn't make as much sense as they might have done. There are quite a few DMS features that differentiate products, and these are not featured.

I think what it did do for me was to focus on where we are weakest: Localisation. Because we developed our software initially at a US/UK company we made the mistake of not separating the user interaction dialogs from the rest of the code. Now we struggle to support languages other than English, and usually turn away any RFI or customer request where that will be a requirement. It's an area we have included in our roadmap, but for now we have to stick with the high-tech companies in the UK and USA, unless they are happy with English everywhere.

I was much happier with some of the other answers, such as for example Q9 "We run our entire company website using the latest version of our own WCM products" - there's a neat short description of how we do this in our website library here.

Anyway, I pulled some of the various answers into one combined table, which I'm including here as a useful summary for others.

Some links to the original blogs:

http://dev.day.com/microsling/content/blogs/main/cmsvendormeme.html
http://www.knowledgetree.com/blog/knowledgetree-cms-vendor-meme
http://blogs.nuxeo.com/ebarroca/2009/03/cms-vendor-meme-nuxeos-turn.html
http://www.opentext.com/blogs/ecm_briefs/2009/03/open_text_on_the_cms_vendor_me.html
http://interwovenblog.com/2009/03/22/the-cms-vendor-meme/

To get the latest updates, use this Google link to the meme (9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf):

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?client=news&um=1&hl=en&q=9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf

 

We've given the cognidox.com website something of a facelift, and, since we can, we're using our own CogniDox Joomla integration to publish content from our CogniDox systems to the site. The most obvious are our tutorial videos, which we script, review and publish out of CogniDox.

We've also started using Flowplayer as the player of hosted flash videos.