It's now been two months since CMS Kickoff 24 in January in Florida and for a recent member's call we heard reflections on the impact of AI from seasoned CMS consultant Tom Cranstoun who joined us from the UK.
While CMS Kickoff 24 wasn't all about AI, the speakers made Tom rethink AI's role in content management. Given the translation, bias, regulation challenges and lack of trust in AI, one needs to employ reviewers and editors to correct the content; AI is better suited for consuming content.
Let’s think that the current state of AI creating content is a beta experiment, best left to the tech guys; we have a business to think of.
In this call, Tom shared how AI Simplicity affects your business, the need for better content modelling and also the key responsibility of an emerging team role: The AI evangelist.
Read moreSelecting the right CMS has never been easy and the marketplace remains confusing, crowded and full of new buzzwords.
At the same time, selecting the right one has probably never been more important with increasing demands and expectations both internally and externally. A good website and a good digital platform to power it five years ago doesn’t necessarily cut it in 2024. Many organisations have found themselves with massive technical debt and forced to migrate to another solution.
In a recent member’s call we heard an interesting non-profit case study from Web Team Leader Genc Kastrati at The Global Fund in Geneva. They’ve been using commercial open source CMS Umbraco to power their multilingual website for over 7 years and are quite happy with it.
The Global Fund is a Geneva-based worldwide movement to defeat HIV, TB and malaria and ensure a healthier, safer, more equitable future for all. Let’s start with a big picture of the Umbraco setup at The Global Fund.
Read moreAI can generate the best content, proofread text, write code, and even conduct code reviews. AI is the best and will put us all out of our jobs.
Is this hype grounded in reality? Is AI truly helping people or are we just diverting our attention to becoming experts in prompt engineering which then consumes our hard-earned time?
I chaired the Tech Forum at the recently held Web Summer Camp in Croatia, which was also the Q3 meeting for our European CMS Expert members. Ondrej Polesny from Kontent.ai kicked us off with a deep dive into the real-life narratives, practical insights, and the potential of AI in content management.
Read moreWhat comes after headless CMS? A composable CMS marks the next natural step in the evolution of content management systems, and offers several benefits.
A composable architecture consists of API-driven components that are pluggable, scalable, replaceable, and that can be continuously improved. When building digital experiences, and websites in particular, using a headless CMS just like any other stack component has turned out to be complex.
Read moreIf you’ve been working in CMS in the past decade, you’ve probably heard of Kentico, the Czech-based software vendor that initially released their product back in 2004, but since then has been rapidly growing and winning customers and partners around the world.
As we’ve covered in this blog, most of the attention around Kentico in the past years have been on their newer Kontent product, which was initially called Draft, while the older, and also to be fair, more mature Xperience product, lived a bit more quiet life.
Having multiple and somewhat overlapping product streams can be challenging for any vendor, also those bigger than Kentico. It easily creates confusion externally and the internal focus can be a struggle. Back in 2019, I called it an ambitious and bold dual product strategy.
Fast forward to this summer - and a big and somewhat unusual decision became public back: Kentico split in two, creating Kontent.ai as a stand-alone company and leaving Kentico to refocus on the Xperience product and what they call flexible DXP as a service.
Newly appointed Kentico CEO Dominik Pinter hosted a recent member call to introduce us to the new Kentico, including a talk about where Kentico stands today and he also shared a bit about the ambitious plans for the future. Let’s start by getting to know the new Kentico a bit better.
Read moreHow we build digital solutions has fundamentally changed in the past few years and this also has huge implications for marketing. To just mention a few of the new arrivals impacting marketing, there’s citizen developers, jamstack, no-code tools and then there’s the headless trend enabling faster and more secure websites while also separating content from presentation.
While many IT analysts, vendors, agencies and also quite a few IT departments have jumped on these emerging trends, marketing has been left catching up while looking at an overcrowded and confusing list of MarTech vendors.
Read moreIn late 2020, IT analyst firm Gartner made the blunt prediction that ‘The Future of Business Is Composable’. A few months later, at the beginning of 2021, Gartner then also introduced the term ‘composable’ to the CMS marketplace with a splash in their annual Market Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms.
To Gartner, a “composable business means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks” and many in our industry translated this to moving away from the large software suites or what’s also known as the monoliths.
This is largely a response to increased customers expectations, demands on shortening project cycles, increased technical debt and finally a growing demand to fit into the existing tech stack. In other words, composability has become a big thing, and many vendors have seized the momentum to also talk about how composability is key for commerce, but what about content?
As we look towards 2022, composable content management is likely to become a key requirement and we already see vendors picking up on the emerging trend.
Read moreThe MACH Alliance’s mission is to future proof enterprise technology and to propel current and future digital experiences with open and connected enterprise tech.
Still, as Casper Aagaard Rasmussen from Valtech said in a recent member conference call, many companies don’t know about the MACH Alliance, don’t understand it or find it an uncertain multi-vendor play.
Besides several notable software vendors, the alliance has also been joined by leading agencies, including Valtech. Casper heads up the global strategic activities within Valtech’s MACH and Composable Enterprises business.
In the member call, Casper shared why the MACH Alliance matters, what it means to the marketplace at large and how it impacts agencies and customers.
Read moreAs a large, global and complex organisation working with consumer goods, how do you both consolidate your brand websites and make it easy to create new ones? In particular, when brand management is distributed globally and websites developed by different teams in different countries, things can quickly get both painstakingly expensive and, to put it mildly tricky to manage.
French-based global spirits company Pernod Ricard was facing exactly this challenge 2 years ago and looking for a content management system that they could use and scale to meet their requirements.
Read more“Let the content folks do their job”
In my conversation with Ottawa-based Mark Demeny from Optimizely, the conversation quickly turned to how we can best empower content creators and site builders. There’s still too much thinking required according to Mark and that’s from someone who’s spent his working life since the late ’90s on web systems and digital platforms.
On February 1st, less than 2 months ago, Mark left Contentful and joined Episerver on Feb 1. Just one week later, Episerver renamed to Optimizely and Mark’s responsibility as Director, Product Management turned from Episerver CMS to what is now called the Optimizely Content Cloud.
At Optimizely he is collaborating with many of his former colleagues from his 8 years at Sitecore and on his to-do-list for the coming months is updating the product architecture and integration to the rest of the Optimizely suite. Mark is our expert of the month.
Read moreHeadless CMS has seen a growing popularity in the past years, mostly driven by developers and customers unsatisfied with their existing digital platforms.
While it is often sold on the premise of many advantages to developers, business users tend to struggle to make the shift to a new paradigm. In a recent CMS Expert session, Petr Palas from Kentico took a look at the most common reasons why headless CMS adoption fails and how to overcome them.
Read moreToday migrating a corporate website from one digital platform to another is a common and well-known exercise, but in recent years the projects have grown more complex, as it’s really often about migrating from one tech stack to another.
In other words, from being analogous to a behind-the-scenes engine change, these projects are today massive change projects with impact throughout the organisation.
At London-based publishing house Pan Macmillan, Technology Director James Luscombe and his team have been hard at work since March moving their website with bestselling fiction & non-fiction books from Kentico EMS based on Azure to a tech stack with Gatsby, Kontent and Netlify.
Read moreIt’s been over a decade since Berlin-based industry analyst Tim Walters famously said:
Content is king. Context is everything
While focusing on delivering good content and blazing-fast websites, buyers of content technology like content management systems or digital experience platforms has witnessed a dizzying level of innovation, new start-ups entering the crowded marketplace, and a neverending list of new terms like headless and JAMstack. It’s been quite far from the consolidation and commoditization predicted by analysts.
Some vendors have focused primarily on improving the authoring experience. To be honest, there’s still plenty of room for improvement in terms of getting content into the system. At the same time, many vendors have focused on the delivery part, making your website fast and accessible. Some with a more technical focus, others more from a marketing perspective.
What few have done, is looking at what I would call the middle ground. The actual composition of the experience. Deciding what content goes where, how the different blocks are placed together, reused and ordered. It’s the key to composing the best digital experience and Croatian digital agency Netgen has taken a stab at making it easier with Layouts - an innovative tool.
Read moreMore and more solutions are coming in the headless space. It is great to have more options, but you need to understand the pros and cons of each solution to find the best fit.
Ivo Lukac shares his insights and a few recommendations:
consider your overall strategy, where are you going with your project(s)
analyse what kind of architecture you need and research which products fit (unfortunately there is no better way than to try it yourself or find someone insightful you can trust)
try not to reinvent the wheel
Don’t lose your head
Read moreIt seems content management has been dealing with the paradox of opportunity and frustration since the inception of the World Wide Web.
Douglas Adams was right - it is fun for nerds like us. To our credit, we spend a lot of time discussing these problems at length, and actually trying to build products and practices to address them - and in many ways, the underlying technologies and frameworks are vastly more effective to what passed for state of the art only a few years ago.
However, despite these advancements in technologies and methodologies which have made scaling these operations cheaper, faster, and far more capable, it’s clear from the research in the market; over time a similar percentage of organizations still have sub-par customer experience and despite falling prices for tools and services, overall costs for customer experience delivery still remain high.
In this post Mark Demeny from Contentful tries to break these problems down from a wider, strategic view, to a more tactical level.
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