The Perfect Destination

By David Braue

Taking a look at how content management has helped Tourism Queensland flourish, as well as examining what's going on in the CMS market as a whole.

Tourism Queensland had a problem. With dozens of people writing content for its website, the company - a peak body for the state's massive and energetic tourism industry - was finding it difficult to apply consistent standards across the content it published across its own sites (www.queenslandholidays.com and www.tq.com.au, for example, are top-ranking tourism sites) and those it hosts on behalf of several related third parties.

Differences in formatting become hard to avoid when many different people are creating content independently, but such shortcomings create real problems when an organisation is trying to maintain a professional appearance. It soon became clear to Tourism Queensland, which was using a small locally produced content management system, that a change was necessary for it to improve its online presence.

The solution was Shado, a content management system from New Zealand company Straker Interactive. Tourism Queensland chose Shado after comparing a number of competing solutions from local and multinational suppliers. Key criteria for the selection included the software's flexibility, customisability, workflow integration and control over issues such as content expiration.

Shado is now being used to re-architect Tourism Queensland's key online properties, reflecting a change in internal workflow processes that's designed to improve consistency between the sites and individual pages on those sites. Additional staff are being brought on, and the organisation has been able to add additional customised elements to meet its particular requirements.

"We've got some really talented developers, and I don't want their time wasted on things like changing a paragraph of text," says Barrie Moore, Tourism Queensland's director of e-commerce. "We want to maintain a consistent and professional look and feel on the site, but this hasn't happened in the past where people were putting different fonts, colours and so on. With Shado, there's a workflow process that lets us restrict what styles and elements they're allowed to use."

With the web now well accepted as an interface for customers - particularly in such a multinational business as tourism - companies of all sorts are finding themselves up against similar problems. Content management systems - which came into widespread use as a way of helping Webmasters keep track of all the information they were supposed to be managing - have become big business as increasingly sophisticated solutions find new ways of delivering content online.

A story of consolidation

In the past, the CMS market has not necessarily been dominated by big-name vendors such as Microsoft and Vignette. Smaller companies, often local developers with just a few employees, have shown remarkable success in hawking their CMS's to customers in their area. Price is often a key factor in CMS pricing decisions, particularly for small businesses that just want to build a simple website and don't have the budget or inclination to drop a few hundred thousand dollars on a big-name CMS.

Those companies are increasingly facing pressure from above, however, as larger competitors realise there's gold to be had in the CMS market. In a recent assessment of the market, analyst firm META Group predicted that the CMS market will surpass $US2.3 billion in software sales and $US7 billion in services by 2007.

META's market analysis forecast a high degree of consolidation as CMS vendors continue to stratify and amalgamate their capabilities. The analyst group envisions significant success for companies with "global presence, significant installed bases, full technology components, deep integration capabilities, robust channels/partners, and the ability to support high-volume, strategic, and enterprise deployments". Oh, and long-term vendor viability.

Proving META's prophecy true, larger CMS vendors have in the past year kicked off a furious consolidation trend that's significantly reshaped the industry. Open Text, for example, spend more than $US225 million in buying email archiving specialist IXOS Software, German rival Gauss Interprise, portal vendor Corechange and real-time multimedia specialist Eloquent.

Those purchases helped Open Text tick off several more of the capabilities that have become essential for big-name companies working to compete in the CMS space: multimedia support, document translation, email support and particularly collaboration have all become essential capabilities.

But Open Text isn't the only one buying: CMS giant Documentum bought collaboration provider eRoom in 2002, and was itself purchased last year by storage giant EMC in a $US1.7 billion mega-deal. CMS provider Interwoven picked up iManage for $US171 million, and Vignette purchased collaboration specialist Intraspect Software.

Even IBM jumped into the game, announcing it would increase its R&D investment in CMS technology by 25 percent and reallocating 2000 developers to the cause. IBM bought smaller CMS and records management specialists Aptrix and Tarian, rolled their technology into the SME-focused DB2 Content Manager Express it launched last October, and soon afterwards announced the purchase of yet another company, Green Pasture Software.

Then there are the smaller, local players: Web design company Step Two Designs' list of local CMS's (www.steptwo.com.au/cm/vendors/australian/) includes 74 local CMS systems that cater to a variety of audiences. Many systems-for example, alphawest6 SiteManager, BluePoint Content Manager and HYRO Technologies exhibeo - were originally built by web developers who encapsulated their own best practices into commercial products that suited their needs and found loyal followings amongst a certain customer base.

Yet the smaller local market will be under threat as larger players continue to bolster their arsenals, adding features that increasingly sophisticated customers are coming to expect. Those niche providers face competition from the abovementioned large companies and multinationals like Microsoft, RedDot Solutions, Xyvision Enterprise Solutions, FileNet, 80-20 Software, Hummingbird, FatWire, Ektron, and Orbital Limited.

After a year of consolidation, the CMS segment has grown up. If today's CMS's are any indication, management of content will remain a core element of future information initiatives at every level. That includes both the mechanics of publishing, and the integration of publishing into wide-spread initiatives related to corporate governance and control.

A new form of internal control

This last capability is becoming particularly important for large companies, where document management and far-reaching imaging initiatives are being shaped by the requirements of archiving. For companies needing to archive, manage and demonstrate control over their online content to a legal certainty, CMS's offering tight integration with governance frameworks will become absolutely critical.

After all, it's not only important to have consistent online content, but to know who created it and with whose approval it was posted. In this way, the CMS will become an essential part of information lifecycle management (ILM) initiatives currently being discussed amongst many companies as critical elements of corporate control. Delivering this capability was a key reason behind EMC's decision to shell out so much to buy Documentum, whose content management capabilities mesh nicely with EMC's core storage management technologies.

As the market continues to evolve, expect the big-name CMS's to extend their tendrils even further into back-end information management systems. META Group believes smaller companies' failure to keep up at a feature level will be a major reason why they lose ground to larger competitors, and it's likely that the missing features will relate to integration with back-end systems. One recent new entrant, Montara Software, has built its entire value proposition around the easy integration it believes close open-standards adherence will allow it to deliver.

For smaller companies, there's enough room in the small end of the market to survive for some time - particularly since several zeroes still separate the price of multinational CMS's from those of smaller local outfits. However, the breadth and variety of offerings in the market mean it is imperative that potential adopters weigh up their options carefully. In particular, they should assess the customisability of the system they're considering, since most companies are likely to want to tailor the CMS to suit their own business.

It's also critical to remember that a CMS is not just software for putting information online; it's a tool for delivering on corporate policies relating to information management. Without those policies dictating how information should flow through the organisation, all a CMS will do is make sure nobody boldfaces the wrong text. With those policies in place, however, the CMS can become a very real driver for business change.

Just ask Tourism Queensland's Barrie Moore. After beginning the migration some time ago, one Tourism Queensland site is live on Shado, and nearly a dozen others are planned to come online throughout the year. A more detailed and relevant approvals process, and a distributed workflow engine that supports large numbers of content authors, has delivered a far more professional online presence that Moore believes will deliver real business value to the company. Furthermore, inherent redundancy built into the Shado servers ensure the system will go up and stay that way.

"It's been surprisingly easy," he says. "We've had to go through years and years worth of content and decide what we're going to keep. But from there, it's just been a matter of taking these old spaghetti sites that have content everywhere, structuring that content, and moving it across. Once it's in, we can be sure it's not going to go out of control like it did."