IBM has been needing a CMS product, but yesterday they bought Aptrix, which is a small Australian company with 45 employees. The product was designed for Lotus Domino, but Aptrix has just integrated to the IBM Websphere portal. Forrester call's this a "good enough" solution for IBM so this won't be targeted for big solutions, but I think the product will be a major competitor for Microsoft Content Management Server, and I expect that the prouct will be very visible in Denmark, because the product targets what is needed for most DK customers.
Now after a very silent period since divine filed a chapter 11, FatWire acquires divines CMS products which previous was Eprise and Open Market.
The price is still a secret, but from Line56, it sounds more like FatWire is buying customers than products. I do hope they will continue the Content Server - great product. The Participant server will hopefully die :-)
Today it was now official - Web500 file for bankrubcy so now it is official. It was stated in todays Computerworld, but I mentioned it yesterday here :-)
A few weeks ago, TJ Group in Denmark was according to Computerworld closed and along with that their CMS. I don't think that their system will be missed by a lot :-)
Yesterday, a rumour about one of the more visible systems Web500 filed for a chapter 11 - according to Niels Hartvig. I still wait for something official, but the rumour about Web500 has been out a while. I never came to see their system in deep - I have had about 5 meetings with Web500 through the last 4 years, but they always forget the promised developer, which could explain about their system. They announced a .NET version some time ago, but it shouldn't be very stable yet - most of their old customers has yet not upgraded their old versions.
There are still too many small Danish CMS out there - FDIH launched a new site CMS finder a few weeks ago. This should be a help to customers seeking a CMS solution, but I don't think you'll find any help here. The vendors have explained about their systems, but who trust that? You should read it as: "What the vendors promised that their systems can't do more than" ...
Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture has conducted a survey for identifying the biggest obstacles to effective content management - the results are available online. When looking into the results, I sure need information on what CMS solutions the 64 recipients already had and the size and complexity of their solutions. It is pritty hard to get any real conclution without this information.
Well there is a lot of acusissions going on in the Content Management world. Today IXOS bought Obtree. Obtree have had a bad 2002, so they probably need funding. Now they got an ok partner, which is in the same markets as Obtree, but with a closer connection to the customers.
Obtree suits IXOS good. Besides from the fact that the press release has almost taking the IXOS server down due to performance overload, they are now getting a fine product with a SAP integration module.
Obtree has for the last year (they increased the price with a factor 3 last may) been overpriced, so hopefully IXOS will be lowering the price in order to ship a lot more products.
I just participated in an online seminar hold by BEA and Divine about CMS and portals, and it seems like Divine have some great portlets for BEA, SUN and IBM Portals. They did not mention Oracle, but I am trying to find this information.
A lot of this can be read on this page.
A great thing was that you get portlets, workflow and editor for $25k, which is pritty cheap :-)
According to analysts, the portals, CM, KM and Collaboration systems are fading, but will not disappear. They will be bundled into Smart Enterprise Suites (SES) to empower the virtual workplace inside companies and between them
This doesn't come as a surprise to me, because this is exactly the same evolution as the ERP, where we started with small systems, then new ideas and business rose and the different vendors started to specialize in different areas (like CRM, HR, Project management, etc.), but now most main ERP vendors has put all the different areas into one major buzz-word: ERP.
Companies like Microsoft, IBM, Divine and Hummingbird are all working on such systems, but Gartner Group does not expect SES to emerge until 2004.
Gartner has an ok description on the Target Functionality for Smart Enterprise Suites.
I just found this dutch (!) reference CMS which contains links to articles etc.
More CMS relevant stuff is found on Intranet Journal where I found a great list of CMS-vendors - It looks a year old though!
If you want to compare a lot of CM systems, use this great scheme.
I just looked into the editor edit-on Pro from RealObjects and it seems to work great. It is fully customable so you can interface to your own images in you CMS system or where you do have them.
A lot of low end CMS vendors is using a simple ActiveX component, but it is not very stable and does only work on MS platforms. Here is a list of a lot of vendors - it is not prioritized:
I found this here...