I'll echo Paul's comments from the vendor side. Ektron has gone from roughly 220 employees late 2009 to nearly 250 in less than three months- and we're still hiring. In fact we've recently hired both a social media strategist and user experience analysts :)

The growth rates experienced by WCMS vendors (Ektron was at 38%) in 2009 is pretty amazing in light of the recession. Forrester predicted in late 2008 that 72% of the companies they spoke with planned to increase their spending on WCMS in 2009. Looks like they were right.

Another positive development is that many recent college graduates are coming to Ektron with lots of experience managing sites and blogs. In some cases, I've interviewed college kids with more practical content management experience than customers and prospects we meet with.

Tom Wentworth
VP Web Solutions, Ektron

Nuxeo, Ektron, and Acquia are also in the Boston area. It makes sense for Day to be in Boston with its talent pool, proximity to the East coast business hubs, and easy access to Europe. I wonder if this is part of a larger trend towards the Boston metro re-establishing itself as a serious competitor to Silicon Valley?

Screenshots are a win-win. As a vendor, I get to write less, and as a buyer you get a better representation of how the vendor solves the problem. I don't see why any vendor would object to this approach.

I think we're at a point in the evolution of Web CMS where we vendors finally understand the problem well enough to provide solutions that don't need to be extended/heavily customized to address common use cases. Years ago, extensibility was key because frankly, we vendors didn't know where things were heading. As the space has matured in the past 5 years, I've seen a whole lot more consistency around customer use cases for web CMS.. Extensibility is still important and I think the "mid-" vendors are leading the way here through rapid adoption of new standards like CMIS and integration into platforms like OpenID, Facebook Connect, etc.

Great points. From the vendor side, there is nothing more frustrating than the feature/function RFP. Open ended questions are the key to extracting meaningful responses. Consider a requirement I saw in a recent CMS RFP from a Fortune 100 company:

- Does your CMS support dynamic publishing?

"Yes, our CMS supports dynamic publishing"

This generic "yes/no" question leads to exactly the sorts of responses that benefit neither the vendor nor the buyer. An open ended question, with some additional description of what's driving the requirement, is far more valuable to both parties. Understanding each CMS vendors publishing model is one of the most important requirements in a CMS evaluation and the answer varies wildly by vendor. Learning that each vendor indeed supports dynamic publishing provides no insight into what that really means for your business.

Vendors are perfectly willing to spend the time crafting a meaningful RFP response- it's a great way for us to educate the buyer on what's makes our solution unique. The more thought the buyer puts into the requirement or scenario, the more thought the vendor will put into the response. A win-win on both accounts.

Another common RFP mistake is to simply grab a sample CMS vendor RFP and send it out "as-is". I can't tell you how many times I've seen the same recycled CMS vendor RFP template sent around with with no customization. This tells me that either a) you have already decided on that vendor or b) your CMS project isn't important because you didn't take the time to articulate your unique requirements.

Here's another good blog on this topic - http://tinyurl.com/nvodxz

I've been wondering when this would happen. If you can't bring the community to your site- support the communities that already exist. I wonder how many other companies/brands will jump on this bandwagon now that Skittles has made it cool...

I think for many companies Facebook Connect will be a quick way of bringing community to the traditional WWW site. If I'm researching a trip to Atlanta on delta.com I want to know what hotels, restaurants, etc. my friends in the area recommend. Why build out a walled community when you can easily support the communities that already exist?

There are implications for CMS vendors. We'll need to view platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and maybe Twitter??!? as common publishing destinations. Speaking of Twitter, which CMS vendor will be the first to automatically send out a tweet when a new page is published? (Note to self- build this demo ASAP!) CMS vendors will also need to support Facebook Connect and Google FriendConnect, and be able to smartly leverage those profiles when dynamically delivering content.

I disagree with your glacial development pace observation. We've delivered important TeamSite and LiveSite releases in the past 12 months. I think you are perhaps underestimating the scope of the releases due to the minor version number increments (and maybe that's our fault...). TeamSite 6.7.2 and LiveSite 3.1 were both quite significant releases and I'd argue our development pace is on par with or ahead of our primary CMS competitors- Tridion, Fatwire, Vignette , Day, Sharepoint, Oracle/Stellent, etc. Many of the features we originally planned for TeamSite 7.0 were in fact pulled into 6.7.1 and 6.7.2. We've got another TeamSite&LiveSite release due out in late March and although you'll be underwhelmed with the version number increase, I think the new functionality will change the game around integrating CMS with website testing.

There will be a TeamSite 7 (I've seen it!) and it will be an evolution focused in some key areas including usability. I won't argue whether or not we need something bigger than an evolution since ultimately it's the customers who decide whether or not a CMS architecture works for them.

Great news! I'm hoping to see lots of interesting (and hype-free) discussions on content management and its related ecosystem.