Disclosure: I am on Interwoven’s customer advisory board
I’ve known Tom Wentworth at Interwoven since 2005 when I was part of the team bringing Interwoven Teamsite (a very capable enterprise level content management system) into CXO Media at IDG.
I’ve posted in the past on the impact of WordPress — the leading open blogging environment — as a free CMS alternative. I was happy to see Tom tackle this topic in a Dec 30 post:
“As a blogging platform, it’s amazing. Having been in the CMS space at Interwoven for roughly 8 years I really appreciate it any time I see innovation in or around the CMS market. WordPress is one of the most innovative and impressive applications I’ve used in quite some time- WordPress changed the game for blogging. I’ve spent a lot of time with WordPress and although I’m not an expert- I’ve spent enough time with it to get a good feel for what it can (and can’t) do.
So- is WordPress a CMS? Well, no. Although Matt Mullenweg might disagree, WordPress is not a CMS- at least not an enterprise CMS. I won’t get into the limitations in this post but suffice it to say that WordPress isn’t ready to tackle the content challenges faced by Interwoven customers. But as a blogging platform, WordPress does many things well. Here are four things I think CMS vendors can learn from WordPress: …
Hat’s off to Tom for tackling the elephant in the room. I need to post in the future from the point of view of a global enterprise customer concerned with expense challenges and asked, on a regular basis, if there is an open (read “free”) alternative to things like metrics and analytics engines and content management systems. Right now, open isn’t ready for prime time, but for SMB and mid-market, the open allure is undeniable.
Love Teamsite (in spite of its quirks); love WordPress but don’t think it could do everything I want for csoonline. Yet.
On the analytics side – from an editor’s POV we still use Omniture but Google Analytics can give me most of what I need. In fact I find their view of inbound search terms much easier to use than Omniture, and IMO that may be the single most useful piece of information in Web publishing.
Tom’s pretty close to on the money. WP doesn’t do everything. Workflow and groups/roles are somewhat lacking. Yet you’d be shocked with some of the stuff I’ve done in WP.
WP isn’t enterprise class yet, but it’s a great option for your one off stuff. Yes you need to use plugins to handle some functions like adding in access to your docman system.
I’ll share some details on a new project I’ve been working on next week. One word: “Workstreaming.” WordPress based, with vBulletin, Yammer, Delicious, and rss/email syndication.