There were two interesting tweets raised out from the Gartner PCC last week.

1)      CEVA (Content Enabled Vertical Applications) are dead, long live to CCA (Composite Content Applications)

2)      Top WCM Trends: Solutions not Systems, (and then: Business not Technical, Strategic not Technical, Local not Global, Users not Visitors)

So in order to correctly connect the dots we then need to understand how content composites are related to content solutions.

About Content Composites

First of all the “composite” term looks like getting recently more and more tractions by software analysts. This is certainly due to the start of the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 massive marketing campaign as one of their new 6 cornerstones is about…. composite. But, ok, why not letting the Content Management industry converges as a whole towards the already widely used Microsoft term. When you are in a position to generate $1.3bn with such a product blockbuster you also probably get the right to impact the market with your own taxonomy.

As far as I am concerned, even if I was getting used to the CEVA term lately (cf: some of my previous blog posts), I wasn’t really convinced by the “V” letter as you could also perfectly have some horizontal content applications on top of your Information Infrastructure (cf: the example below). And the rationale to distinct between a vertical or an horizontal application is quite vague.

The Composite term also makes a better link with SOA applications (cf: definition of them in the Magic Quadrant for SOA Composite Application Projects). As defined in this report you could perfectly have both some front-end composites (in the previous era they were called portlets) and some back-end composites (and far, far, far away they were called CORBA components). Terms and technologies change, underlying ideas usually stay the same. So why not after all trying to regroup all the mashups, widgets, portlets, SOA applications, etc… under one single umbrella: Composites. This makes sense.

About Content Solutions

Starting from the beginning of the financial crisis last year, we could observe more pressure for ready to use solutions which are trying to immediately solve real business problems rather than generic content platforms composed of dozens of loosely coupled modules. This probably sounds like the end of the all-in-one Swiss knife approach in favor of more business focused vertical solutions.

By combining increased requirements for faster ROI and perhaps also painful past CMS integration experiences, organizations now tend to prefer ready-to-use, rapidly effective and more simple solutions to address some of their existing business problems rather than a complex and raw information platform which will requires hundreds of additional integration man/days (which also turn to be usually very hard to define and precise upfront for an integrator). This does not mean of course that customers do not need a robust and state of the art underlying information infrastructure any more. This simply means that a CMS can not be delivered now without being first packaged with some vertical solutions. Customers also tend to phase their projects in two phases: a small initial project to install and use the default pre-packaged verticals which are nearly used on an as-is basis and then, if needed, a second more complex customization phase. Simple risk mitigation.

Applied to the WCM industry this trend reflects a shift from all major vendors to package and sell some kind of “Web Marketing Suite” (or Online Marketing Suite or all other similar terms). Such solutions target directly CMO and their MarCom team. The idea is to not only allow them to build a web site but to provide to them all the required tools to ensure its long term success and efficiency (web engagement), to deliver precise metrics (web analytics), to connect with existing social networks or internal communities (social media and online communities) and to control the overall company brand (reputation management). This is of course a natural shift for WCM solutions which all resolved the first business problems they were initially design for aka the “be able to delegate to non-technical users update on your site web” a couple of years before. Indeed this problem mainly disappeared with the apparition of Web 2.0 technologies and WCM players neede to reinvent themselves and bring other additional forms of value added.

But this is not the only indication of such a trend from platform towards solutions. If I keep aside SharePoint 2010 which is also fully removing from their future offering all the WCM, ECM, Portal, DMS and other server-centric terms to only focus on business rationales, intranet oriented systems are now also embracing the more generic Enterprise 2.0 trend and its suite of pre-packaged solutions. For example MindTouch, an enterprise wiki, is now offering solutions to “safely crowdsource your business” or to rapidly bootstrap a “Collaborative intranet”. Social software actors are not in rest. Jive is now declining it Social Business Platform into an “Employee Engagement Center”, a “Marketing and Sales Center”, an “Innovation Center” or a “Support Center”.

Does it mean that customers are suddenly becoming more stupid and that editors need now to push to them the solution to their business problems? Certainly not. But this certainly means that they are getting tired of checkbox-driven platforms which can do an incredible number of things on paper but which, at the end of day, require tremendous amounts of integration and assembly time in order to make any usable and workable solution out of it. Moreover most of the time this plethora of CMS driven features is only used by 2 or 3% of the end-users (doesn’t it remind you all the features provided as part of MS Word and this kind of competition rally? But finally who is really using all of them?). Applying some Lean Management principles to the CMS industry could certainly be a good thing. And solution-driven CMS will probably help focus more on real business problems rather than on trying to compete on RFP processes with the longest list of features.

From Content Composite to Content Solutions

So how do we now link content composites to content solutions? Usually composites rely on a common and standardized information infrastructure stack. Either they share a common content repository or at least they are open enough (think RESTful, CMIS.ready or any other forms of content interoperability) in order to be able to act as lego bricks on top of a unified information infrastructure.

But then, similar to your Ikea components, you still need to assemble part or whole of them in order to create your resulting business solution. The problem today is that CMS are most of the time only providing the “basic green baseplate” and some “colored basic bricks”. No assembly manuals! Of course as CMS integration work is slightly more complex and sophisticated than building an house with your Lego bricks, modules assembly in a CMS looks like definitively much closer to the buying-an-Ikea-Wardrobe-without-any-notice kind of experience. Are you ready to spend weeks (or even more) trying to figure out ho to assemble all your CMS “composites” into one consistent solution? Are you ready to pay for such an experience? Even with all the detailes on how to build your Ikea furniture, you are quite heavily tempted usually to make some “Nuke-them all” kind of punitive expeditions after a couple of minutes. Imagine now without having any instructions at all. This is however the usual CMS experiences much users and integrators have to live with. Download Drupal (acting as the baseplate), download a couple of their “bricks” and then figure out how it will finally looks like on your own (nothing personal against Drupal this is just the best example of such a CMS with its thousands of “”United-colors-of-Benetton” kind of modules. But all CMS looks like more or less in the same kind of situation).

So what’s a content solution then?

I like to take the analogy of the “Discussion Forum” to answer to this question. Back to the eighties there were Bulletin boards (youngest readers probably never heard such a term ;-) ), then discussion forums and more recently commentable activity streams. Taken separately out from any business perspectives these are basically threaded or nested lists of comments. But such “composites” do not solve any business problems “per se”.

Now if you combine them with another rating composite and if you put them within the context of a business environment, you can for example rapidly assemble a user feedback solution à la uservoice.com. Such a correct assembly of several basic underlying composites in order to provide a fun and enjoyable user experience could then solve one real existing business problem: virtualize the old-fashioned “company suggestion boxes”.

You now have your content solution.

What is interesting is that the strengths of solutions such as uservoice.com (or derivative such as intensedebate.com, disqus.com and similar) do not rely on the number of features they propose as part of their “discussion forum” (there are plenty of them available out there for free which are much more powerful) but on the correct assembly of some raw familiar composites in order to address and solve one single business problem. Their solution is also very simple to integrate with third party tools (no risky integration overhead). Last but not least their proposed solution is easy to use (fun to use and addictive). Someone mentioned last week on Twitter why an end-user should get some learning sessions to update a page within his CMS. Does he need to get some training session before being able to post something on FaceBook or on Twitter? So why an employee would need some training sessions to post an answer or a comment in his newly provided e-suggestion box?

So rapid raw composite assembly, fast integration and ease of use are the three new pillars of next generation content solutions.

If such solutions are already pre-packaged as part of the CMS offerings, this will result in customers getting some real immediate working business solutions and a faster CMS ROI. These are the kind of solutions that CMS actors, mainly driven by techies, have still problems to correctly assess and provide to the market. But such solutions which exceed customer satisfaction are the future of CMS as the whole industry is rapidly converging towards similar core features and some UI standardization.

So long live to content composite correctly assembled into productive content solutions.