BTW, I should point out that Jane McConnell pretty much invented the term Digital Workplace, or was at least the earliest popularizer. Also, Martin White chimed in on the topic the day before I published this piece. See his great post here: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/death-...

Thanks, Jane. Your survey is a great service!

@Diane: soon...

Christopher-

Many thanks for adding a customer perspective.

Tony Byrne

Hey Roland-

Thanks for your comment! My purpose in such a short blog post on such a complicated topic was to alert prospective Web CMS customers that these topics represent two challenges that are likely to pre-occupy them for the duration of their projects -- and if they had any doubts about that, they could go back and look at vendor release notes.

Cheers,

Tony

@ Cheryl. We believe the key here is to focus on testable, narrative scenarios rather than line-item requirements. They tend to expose the most critical needs -- and when you see vendors test them, expose the requirements you didn't think were important...but turn out to be critical. (Consult our research for examples.)

Hey Joseph-

Thanks for your (always) sage additions and commentary. You make a good point about comparing smaller vendors to product teams within a larger vendor. I find many customers are surprised to learn that the latter are often much smaller than the former in terms of dev and support headcount.

Which takes me back to the larger point: we could disagree about whether smaller or larger vendors are more likely to jettison or suffocate key products. The larger conclusion, I think, is that a big name vendor offers at a minimum no better guarantee of product longevity than a small.

@theHam. Yes, you're right. Much better than "Open Text Web Solutions" -- which is really a mis-nomer, since there are four or five "Web Solutions" at OTEX...

Thx for the comments, everyone.

@next_connect-Mike: I see your point about wanting to avoid significant customizations and extensions on the 07 platform at this point. In the event, I think I'd still want to weigh the pros and cons of doing anything at all until SP10 got more burned-in.

@Mark: I have been engaged with the tremendous SharePoint community for seven years now, and have seen nearly unparalleled passion and loyalty there. But I don't always buy the party line, and don't believe that all the books, blogs, and advice coming out of the beta period stands in adequately for large-scale production experience. Of course it depends on your company's tolerance for risk, but amid all the partying, it seems like no one is talking about risks at all. So I did.

Cheers!

Tony Byrne

Matt-

That's a good point about distinguishing between "rely" and "involve." In our experience, larger Drupal and Joomla! implementations tend to make use (sometimes extensive use) of plug-ins. That doesn't make them inherently insecure, but it does mean that the customer needs to check the security profile (among other characteristics, like performance, upgradability, etc.) of not just the core platform, but also each individual plug-in.

Thx again for writing in.