One on One with Joe Bachana of DPCI

Joe Bachana [1] is the founder and president of the consulting firm, DPCI [2], which advises clients on web content management and digital asset management systems. His career dates back 20 years and includes time with the New York Times and the Associated Press, before he formed DPCI in 1999. I asked him about how DAM differs from traditional CM, his opinions on SharePoint and the general state of the industry.

FCM: You work with companies on choosing digital asset management systems? How does managing digital assets differ from managing content that's mostly text?

JB: Great question and one that I want to cover in depth at the Henry Stewart Symposium in June. Digital asset management systems generally do a great job with rich media objects (video, audio, graphics, etc.) but they treat them as files that can be tagged and/or have metadata references within the DAM’s repository. That class of product also generally does pretty well hooking into automation tools, or bridging to web content management systems and other primary business systems. However, DAM products, as a rule, do not treat a text file--whatever file type, be it Word, Incopy, Oxygen, etc.--as anything more than an object. Companies exceedingly need to put these text documents through workflows with global participants, and DAM doesn't do a great job on workflow management for media-independent authoring. Also, these text files need not only to be indexed, but processed in such a way that semantic meaning is abstracted from them based on vertical market taxonomies.

I’m not saying that DAM can’t get there, I’m just seeing more invention on the XML server side--MarkLogic Server is not particularly known for its DAM functionality, but it brings a lot of value to text workflows and delivery/distribution.

I think EMC has had some interesting ideas around Documentum as a single-source repository with DAM capabilities. They also tried to do the WoodWing [3] SmartConnection integration and they acquired XHive [4] last year. So they may be a company that is investing heavily in this vision--whether they get there at a price point that people can afford is a different matter all together.

FCM: How many of your clients use SharePoint? Where do you see SharePoint fitting in the web content management infrastructure?

JB: Quite a number of our customers use SharePoint to manage projects as well as form-based workflows within their organization. I don’t see many companies using SharePoint for DAM since it is not a particularly robust solution for the necessary use cases in comparison to the other DAM-specific products in the market. As far as WCMS capabilities of SharePoint, they are not terrible--the product can be used for that purpose and we have done extensive R&D around this. However, we haven’t gotten a single customer to jump over to using SharePoint as a WCMS. Which is interesting to me, since so many companies own SharePoint enterprise licenses as part of their global agreements with Microsoft. So, go figure!

FCM: What's your assessment on the general state of ECM (including web cm, DAM and social media) given the state of the economy right now?

JB: That is a loaded question, but I’ll try to simplify this. People are investing aggressively in web content management right now. This is a big area of growth, principally around replacing antiquated systems that aren’t working or that park workflow with a single webmaster, but also with extending existing sites to be more interactive with customers (what you’re calling social media above, but perhaps broader in the sense of developing the customer community). With DAM, we’re getting a lot of calls to extend existing applications as well as to integrate them with WCMS or other business applications.

I do not see much investment in document management or records management right now unless companies are downsizing offices and need to digitize their volumes of paper files. In that case, if they don’t have solutions in place, they are looking at open-source products like Alfresco and perhaps Nuxeo as opposed to some of the bigger players.

FCM: You named the top three Web CMSs for small publishers as Clickability, Drupal and WordPress. It's interesting that you chose two open source vendors and a SaaS vendor. Why did you pick these three?

JB: Normally I wouldn’t respond to a ‘top-three’ query, but I had been interviewed for a larger article [5] on best practices in web content management for small publishers. I believe that will appear in Folio, their print magazine. As a sidebar, Matt asked me to comment on my web CMS picks. There’s a number of products I really like right now, some of them are not cheap. I picked these three mainly since small publishers will fall into three groups--can’t afford to implement its own CMS so SaaS, can’t afford a lot but wants some independent autonomy so WordPress, wants a system to grow into and get aggressive online over time, so Drupal.

I also picked WordPress because it is one of the fastest products to implement for a blog-centric kind of site. It also does a fine job with SEO.

I picked Drupal because it is the closest thing to a full-featured CMS, with thousands of modules available for just about any kind of functionality. It also has phenomenal SEO support, is quite extensible, and has a well-built community module called Organic Groups. Also, for anyone that is anti-Drupal out there, there is no way that anyone could contest the fact that the Drupal community is vast and growing rapidly. What that means is project resources will be highly available and reasonably affordable – two things that small publishers need.

For SaaS, I chose Clickability because it has most of the features a small publisher would need and it also appears to be a company with a good support model. If you ask a number of small publishers how their arrangements are going with smaller hosted CMS providers, they are struggling with support issues as well as feature/functionality requests that go unheeded. Recently a colleague of mine called my attention to SquareSpace (was also cited as a credible SaaS solution in a comment on your site [6]).

Seems they are getting a lot of favorable press these days, although it might be due to sponsorship/advertising. I’m looking deeper into that solution.

Frankly, if a publisher can’t afford to implement its own CMS, they need to look at a few SaaS options to compare features and functions as well as look at the different vendors to see what fits the business needs.

FCM: In that same article you named the top three social media platforms, Joomla! was conspicuously missing on both lists. Why no love for Joomla! in either of the lists, especially Joomla!'s Community Builder?

JB: We’ve worked with Joomla! and the feeling right now is, its not where publishers need to be on SEO, which quite frankly is the main driver for consumer publishing sites to be discovered on the major search engines. Rather than rehash why my developers prefer Drupal over Joomla!, here is a link [7] from one of the team members. Frankly, we’d be delighted if Joomla! gave Drupal (or other open-source CMS solutions) a run for its money--competition is great. Also, Mike Johnston of cmscritic.com [8] did a great interview of Louis Landry [9], who is a very active member of the Joomla! core community. I think the interview says it all.