“RE: Ugly Secrets of Content Management Systems”

"What I think they miss is that it's a lot of work to write the underside of a CMS. Sure, Vignette's system has a lousy reputation among those who actually use it, mainly because their workflow system sucks... but what so many companies will find is that it's an awesome amount of work to try to develop the services that Vignette provides in your own in-house product... and then you have to try to support it. If IT staffs were static, that would be fine, but they're not."

Hmmm...I read the same article last week and thought "This is good news for Seth." Why?

First the article could be boiled down to this: Vignette stinks. If your choice is buy Vignette or write your own system, you'd actually be better off writing your own CMS software than waste your time with this (does Vignette have *any* satisfied users? All I see on the Internet are people dogging it, especially designers and developers who have had to try to work around Vignette's limitations to make their site work like they want).

On the other hand, the article's suggestion that companies have their IT Staffs develop a proprietary CMS isn't going to fly outside of maybe large media companies. The IT turnover is a huge problem. I worked at a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical firm last year and they were constantly running across legacy code and applications written by people who had long since left the company, and of course the emphasis is *always* going to be on getting the software up and working and maintained and not on documenting the application when you're working at a non-computer firm (the attitude being "we're in the business of making drugs, not writing software documentation.")

This makes about as much sense as writing an article pointing out that pretty much all of the enterprise-scale mail solutions have serious drawbacks, so companies should just develop their own system.

The opportunity cost to developing large scale software like that is just too high. Maybe Time, or the Tribune want to do this, but most companies know that once they step outside their core competencies they're in trouble.

What this does do is create a huge opening. Take the company I worked at -- rather than develop a proprietary system, what we did was take maybe 10 or 15 different products and try to interface them in this clunky system. It was a lot like my old web site -- you had a few CGI programs to handle some stuff, you had an enterprise-level meeting planning software that could write to HTML, there was a very hard to use interface so you could update meeting plans via email, but all the project pages were mocked up in Dreamweaver or Frontpage. And maybe three or four people out of 20,000 actually understood how the whole system worked.

I think the failure of Vignette is a perfect opportunity for a company like Macrobyte. I can see how a souped up version of Conversant would really solve a lot of problems we were always running into trying to integrate people and projects, much of it caused by having to use so many different systems.

The primary difficulty I imagine you'll have is on the marketing side. I'm sure you read them, but if you flip through the various IT-oriented magazines it's just one after another product promising to solve all of your web problems. The market is so saturated with products, it's going to be a challenge to get noticed. But once you can get the feature set down and get in front of customers, I don't think you'll have that hard a sell.