Putting these factors into consideration,  I have put together some thoughts on how CMS will trend in 2010.

1. Federation over Centralization: I always love the line “the best repositories are the ones you have.”  This is where I see CMS going.  CMS solutions will need to continue to grow in integration capabilities and function as the connective tissue between federated repositories.  The opportunity cost  of moving large legacy  repositories of one format into another centralized CMS is high.  Centralization is an attractive term from a operations management perspective, but most often not technically viable.  Some CMS evangelists always promote centralization and consolidation when it comes to content management practices, but this not really realistic. For example, many companies will continue to leverage different solutions and packages across their CMS stack, these product will continue to need new ways of talking to each other.
2. Cloud Options: With the economic downturn in play, cloud solutions will grow in adoption, especially in Web Content Management + Marketing scenarios.  The cost saving and time to market considerations will provide significant pressure to try out these options.  Many products are looking for examples on how o install and configure their products within Mosso, Amazon EC2, HP, IBM, or other cloud hosting providers.
3. CMS + API + SOA (Rest, JSON, XMPP): Content will need to continually pushed and pulled to and from more sites, channels, and mobile device.  Content will need quick and easy means of integrating into widgets, apps, iphones, android apps, etc.  As a result, APIs and SOA for content services are critical for strategic positioning.
4. WCM + Analytics + Targeting + Testing: WCM will continue to expand into the complete experience around content. Especially how content is performing, targeted, and delivered within experiences across multiple sites and channels.  WCM vendors will continue to acquire and establish partnerships to expand their offerings.
5. Faceted Search: As federation expands, faceted search with grow in importance to search and locate content via filtering and metadata.
6. Open Source will expand: Open source solutions will grow in adoption, especially in social networking and content distribution scenarios.  The adoption of Drupal by the http//www.whitehouse.gov is dispelling the myth that open source cannot scale and provide an enterprise level solutions.

Interestingly enough, even though the technology is there, the use of faceted search and navigation in mostly content sites has been lagging. However, in the last year, we have finally seen an uptick in the use of this pattern beyond commerce sites. With the redesigned Bing search engine really leveraging this concept, and driving some of the innovation around search, I believe we will see the concept become a standard practice on sites that have large amounts of content.

One additional contributing factor is that there is also some traction around the lower end and open source market. Although vendors like Endeca and Coveo have been providing this capability for the enterprise for a while now, open source and low cost alternatives are emerging as well.
For example, Apache Solr is getting a lot of traction recently, and Acquia launched a hosted faceted search capability for Drupal earlier this year.

This is an exciting development, and I believe we will see significant improvements in site search in the future.

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I truly value some high level assessments of great products like Autonomy Teamsite, Sitecore, Ektron, and Sharepoint; since a majority of the open source solutions cannot scale in fortune 500 situations across the enterprise.  However, when evaluating a magic quadrant of WCM, you cannot leave the open source off the table, many large distributors of content and SMBs are looking to open source since they provide quick and easy solutions for business users to rapidly produce and publish content.  Trends of WCM/CMS now place a higher value on development community over revenue.  Through development communities, companies can accelerate innovation and adoption of new web 2.0 and social media features.

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By Matthew Johnson
Senior Technical Architect
Razorfish CMS Center of Excellence
http://www.razorfish.com

As we have seen over the last 5 years, ROI is one of the most important performance measures and justifications of large enterprise CMS projects. The primary measure of CMS performance can no longer be solely based upon efficiency (automation and centralization of content.) Now, “actual content performance” measures the success of a CMS. Content performance relies on how relevant a company’s content is to its target audience/customer base. Continual testing, optimization, and delivery of content are vitally important for companies looking to improve conversion ratios, usability and ROI. It has been proven that small changes can have huge impacts on conversion, sales, etc. Through multivariate testing, companies can quickly identify and adjust content to meet current demands and quickly adopt a test and learn methodology to refine content. However most CMS vendor focus on the repository and display of content, not the complex process of leveraging analytics to refine, adjust and deliver content based on real-time scenarios. Every CMS product on the planet can pretty much do the basic CMS functions (storage, metadata, presentation templates, basic workflow, etc…), however most do not have A/B, multivariate-testing capabilities.

A/B testing: compare two different versions of a page or content location.
Multivariate-testing: simultaneously measures the performance of several content variations on a page.

However, this is all changing, large CMS companies are seeing this capability as a key blue ocean feature. This year Autonomy/Interwoven and Sitecore  added optimization and targeting capabilities to their CMS platforms.  Even Analytics vendors are arming up with this capability; WebTrends acquired Widemile a leading provider of multivariate testing and site optimization technologies and services.

I think the role of a CMS will change to:
1. Repository
2. Management
3. Measure
4. Refine
5. Distribute

A holistic CMS/Targeting solution I believe will give many organizations a competitive advantage in delivering the best in breed content to their targeted audience.

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Image via Wikipedia

Drupal is a great open source CMS. One of the reasons I like it is the strong community around the platform. There are many different modules available for all kinds of purposes, ranging from forums to integration with salesforce.com. Secondly, many vendors releasing new products are creating plugins for this platform to generate traction, such as Kaltura , OpenX and Mobify.me. With this kind of community support, an open source CMS solutions have a leg up in how easily new features or trends can be incorporated in a web site. Other open source solutions like WordPress have these same benefits as well.

It is interesting to see that there is now also some community traction around enhancing the user experience of the Drupal administration functionality. This blog post shows some great ideas around improvements than can be made, while still building upon the foundation that is currently in place. The Drupal 7 User Experience project outlines similar strong ideas. Incorporating ajax functionality such as drag and drop within the admin user interface would make Drupal a CMS that can become much more user friendly, allowing business users to really control their site.

Once the leading products have been evaluated and scored, vendor demonstrations have taken place and discussed, we take a step back and look at the overall results. Based on these elements, a decision can be made that meets the majority of requirements, and also is the right fit for the organization.

Razorfish just released a great report at http://fluent.razorfish.com. This report shows the ever growing importance of social media within the digital landscape. An interesting topic that is hard to grasp the is how enterprises will gain control of social media and centralized federated content into one holistic or a mashup of content repositories. As social media expands, a greater importance of archival, compliance, retention will grow in the future as content expands. We are seeing content growth within organizations at 100+% year over year. When you think of fortune 100 companies, that amount is massive in sheer size. Many solutions in play such a Autonomy/Interwoven, SharePoint, Filenet, etc… just do not have a clear method of how companies will centralized content being distributed across social media and other off domain channels. Content is becoming more segmented and portable, but how will organizations retain and process all the vast entries of user submitted comments and content. Content is becoming federated and spread across channels, but how will content phone home and be stored?

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I just wanted to provide a brief reply to this basic question I get from various clients. Why should I use a CMS? Many clients who are new to CMS/WCM, view the solution as just another repository or database.  I continually get this response, why can’t we just put the content in Oracle, or SQL Server etc… well you can… but that is not the primary objective of a CMS and it will not get you the economies of scale in content management.  A CMS is supposed to enable a “Management System” which involves:

• Operations Management & Governance: (Strategy, Policies, Roles, Responsibilities, Workflow, etc)
• Content Development: (Content Editing, Reuse, Search Engine Optimization, Channel Agnostic and Specialization)
• Content Repository: (Content Storage, Source Code Storage)
• Content Distribution: (Cross Channel / Cross Infrastructure Deployment, Integration Services, Transformation/Template Services)

Many companies jump right into repository and integration mindset.  AKA, how do I store some content and get it onto the site.  Well this is a great idea, but to get value out of a CMS, you must set up the operational infrastructure and governance model to sustain a CMS.  If you focus on repository/integration, you are only solving specific technical problems for most often one defined channel like one web site, not larger scale and business specific operational needs.  Most often this approach involves a reduced set of resources that know how to store and integrate the content for a specific channel.  The result is a CMS that can be leveraged by only a certain subset of resources and then limits the reuse of content.  I do not know how many times I have seen a multi million-dollar CMS implementation that only can be used by 4-5 people and only use 30% of a CMS’s capabilities.

A CMS is supposed to empower your Content Management Model to allow more people to participate in the content process, whether its content production, viewing, reuse, and deployment.  A properly deployed CMS solution will also enhance a short time to market for content integration/distribution into new channels.

Key questions to ask yourself before you begin big CMS projects are:

• Who participates in CMS requirements? (It should not be controlled by IT only)
• Have you developed your Content Types and Content Hierarchies?
• Have you defined your roles and responsibilities (Who are editors, content contributors, QA, support)
• Have do defined your existing workflows and how they can be mapped to a CMS?
• Is you content semantic and portable?
• Are you planning to transform your content so it can be used cross channel?
• Do leverage in context view of content?
• Do you use Data Capture and Presentation layer template technology?