Unveiling the Truth: CMS Vendor Checklist Reactions

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.