CMS Watch says today's WCM tools can't match Obama's vision

These would seem to be golden times for the Web Content Management industry. A recent Forrester report suggested that private sector companies will continue to spend money on WCM even in this "economic situation." What's more, in a January memo, the president ordered government departments to find ways to be more transparent, collaborative and participatory. You would think these three words would have web content management executives jumping for joy.

After all, isn't this what WCM marketing hype has told us for the last year is exactly what these tools can do? Haven't the latest solutions married the best of Web 2.0 tools and traditional site management to produce the perfect mix of transparency, collaboration and participation--whether you want to deal internally or externally with customers, partners and suppliers? Sorry to burst your bubble, but according to a CMS Watch report released this week, there is no single, perfect tool for the job, at least not yet.

Reality trumps hype

Here at FierceContentMangement, we get a daily dose of vendor pitches and it's easy to get lost in the sea of hype, but this report by CMS Watch is a cold dose of reality. CMS Watch is vendor-neutral with no agenda beyond providing clear direction for CMS buyers (disclosure: CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne is a fellow EContent contributing editor), so when they say something it makes me stand up and take notice. In fact, CMS Analyst Jarrod Gingras says that vendors have concentrated on providing a way to secure social interactions inside the enterprise and this could be an issue for government agencies looking to find ways to involve the public in a more participatory democracy where most of the action takes place outside the firewall.

"Web CMS vendors have begun to incorporate community features, but in reality most CMS platforms are not built to ingest user-generated content--they have more 'inside-out' architectures," Gingras explains. He says that the community software vendors are actually better positioned to deal with the issues a government website is likely to face, with high-volume, user-generated content.  "In higher-profile public settings," Gingras points out, "enterprises incorporating user-generated content have to pay more serious attention to security, scalability, usability, and access control considerations--where best-of-breed community suppliers have a much better track record."

Is there a single solution?

When it comes down to it, CMS Watch doesn't think there is a single solution. Instead, it appears to require a combination of stand-alone community and social software along with a good Web Content Management system to deal with workflow, management, archiving and other lifecycle issues. Byrne says everyone is looking for a single solution, but in reality it's not there yet.

"Everyone wants a single environment where tightly-managed and lightly-managed/unmanaged content can co-exist effectively, but the industry isn't there yet," he says. "Any agency seeking to improve transparency as well as participation needs to keep a critical eye on the limitations of present technologies in a public setting, and consider a multi-vendor strategy going forward."

Unless CMS Watch is wrong, and their track record suggests they are not, it would seem that Web CMS vendors still have a long way to go to provide the types of services many companies and government agencies are clamoring for in a single package. I find this personally disappointing because what I've been hearing from vendors suggests otherwise.

Talk back: We want to hear from you. What's your experience? Can you manage internal and external content in a single package? - Ron