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How does SDLTridion rate on J. Boye's 8 CMS features you are likely never to use?

Posted by Dominic Cronin at Mar 21, 2011 09:25 PM |
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CMS industry analyst Janus Boye just posted "The 8 CMS features you are likely never to use". Generally, I agree with Janus's 8 points, and I definitely agree with the thinking behind it; that it's important to know which features are relevant to you when choosing a CMS. Here's my point-by-point take on how this applies to Tridion:

  • Workflow is something most customers ask for, but the vast majority don’t use it. Some use very simple approval processes, but that’s quite far from some of the wizz-bang visual workflow creation tools that I’ve seen in sales meetings.

    • Dominic: Indeed, the vast majority don't use it, and I'd be the first to advise them not to. Unless, of course, they need it. Working with workflow is always going to be more complex than working without it, but if you have a governance requirement which demands it, you have to have it. Tridion can meet this need, but I'm very glad most implementations don't need it.

  • Color coding changes; so that you can easily see what changed between versions (similar to Microsoft Word change tracking) is also a nice demo feature which may be used to differentiate a vendor, but in reality customers rarely use it.

    • Dominic: This feature is available in Tridion, and to be honest, I don't know how much it gets used by content workers. For developers, I'd say it gets used pretty regularly.

  • Microsoft Office integration; e.g. getting content from Word into CMS by directly clicking save from Word. SharePoint is the main exception to this, where several SharePoint customers actually use this feature, in particular for their intranet. Many press releases and other web content are born in Word, so this demo normally get the editors excited, but in reality Word integration often ends up as a copy and paste job.

    • Dominic: At one time or another, Tridion has had built-in integrations with Word. Over the years, people have realised that copy and paste works just as well, and they understand it better. Most implementations have some code in the format area XSLT for cleaning up the MSO "crap" that comes along with the paste. I don't know of anyone these days using an explicit integration, (or even if it's still on the truck at Tridion).

  • Future preview, e.g. how will my site look in a week for scheduling campaigns. A nice idea, in particular for digital marketing to be able to see how the site will look at the launch of the next campaign, but not exactly straight-forward to implement.

    • Dominic: You could implement this easily enough in Tridion with maybe some BluePrinting and an extra publication target. On the other hand, I have never, ever, been asked for this.

  • Back-end analytics; e.g. CMS statistics on usage of the administrative / editorial interface. Most web professionals struggle to find time to look at their website analytics, so while this can also be a persuasive sales demo, very few find the time to actually look at the CMS statistics.

    • Dominic: Totally agree. What? Like the content teams have got too much time on their hands. Gee, we musta been good! :-)

  • Advanced search; very few people use Google Advanced Search, and even fewer use and rely on the advanced search provided by the CMS. Some vendors have implemented advanced search features, often via integration with a 3rd party search engine. Once and again; this can be a great demo in particular for those organizations that feel they are drowning in content, but advanced search is simply not used.

    • Dominic: Down the years, Tridion has been a "best of breed" WCMS. The vision was always to have great APIs, so that Tridion itself could integrate well with other specialised software. (In other words: have some focus; stick to what you're good at.) It's not uncommon to feed data to a search engine at publish time, although just having your search appliance spider the site is probably just as good. So advanced search is often a requirement on Tridion projects, but you don't usually use Tridion itself for it. Of course, these days, we have advanced taxonomy support, and some search-like features might well be driven by categorising content on the back end.

  • A/B testing e.g. for headlines on-the-fly to find the headline that performs best. A/B testing is beginning to become more popular, but is mostly implemented outside the CMS by a 3rd party tool.

    • Dominic: Indeed - more usually done with a third-party tool. It's not core WCMS functionality. You can definitely integrate it via some of Tridion's out of the box features (e.g. target groups, customer characteristics) but it's not what a WCMS is for.

  • Frontpage editing, e.g. click directly on edit on a given page; another great demo which scores cheap usability points. Rarely implemented in the real world, except for small customers that don’t worry too much about staging environments, permissions and quality assurance processes.

    • Dominic: In Tridion, this is called SiteEdit, and these days it's pretty much an expected part of an implementation, perhaps even more so with big customers. I think Janus is missing the point a little here. You need a staging environment for this approach to make sense, because that's where you use it. You certainly don't miss out permissions and quality assurance. With Tridion SiteEdit, you still need the requisite permissions, and your quality assurance process stays intact.

     

    Keep the good stuff coming Janus. Maybe some other people will give a detailed breakdown for their favourite CMS.

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