Rage
Against the Content Management Machine
Can content management systems handle your multilingual
application needs? Over the last few years content
management has evolved from simple tools for editing
and posting HTML pages to an enterprise platform
for creating, managing, and distributing a wide
range of corporate assets. In this report we interview
managers responsible for one or more of their
firm's multiple applications. We review the technology
challenges faced by developers and assess the
ability of today's enterprise content management
systems to make the leap to global content management.
- Nearly
two-thirds of our interviewees built their own
content management solutions rather than buy
a commercial content management (CMS) or globalization
management (GMS) system. Only 46% leverage linguistic
tools like translation memory.
- Some CMS
suppliers estimate more than a 25% industry
failure rate for content management applications,
but suspect a much higher rate for multilingual
efforts due to their more complex process and
workflow requirements.
- Despite
the problems associated with commercial CMS
and multilingual applications, we found that
building creates more problems than it solves.
The report focuses on how today's enterprise
CMS solutions will evolve to a more global role.
Who's who
in managing content? In this report we assess
the suitability of a wide range of suppliers for
dealing with multilingual content:
- Mainstream
CMS including Atomz, Clickability, CrownPeak,
Day, Divine, Documentum, Empolis, FatWire, FileNet,
Gauss, IBM, Ingeniux, Interwoven, iUpload, Ixos,
LAI, MediaSurface, Merant, Microsoft, Obtree,
PaperThin, Percussion, RedDot, Roxen, Stellent,
Tridion, Unisite, and Vignette.
- GMS including
Brink's (OTTO), GlobalSight, Idiom, LAI, Star,
Trados, and Translations.com (formerly eTranslate).
- Supporting
players. We discuss where an assortment of technologies
such as search and categorization, XML and WebDAV,
and JSR170 fit (or don't) on the multilingual
content management landscape. We detail the
importance of language service providers and
mainstream system integrators in the content
management mix.
This report
effort was led by Don DePalma, who in 1996 was
one of the first industry analysts to identify
the content management category. In subsequent
reports on CMS at Forrester he expanded his coverage
to include organizational issues, the need for
integral globalization, and the evolution to a
corporate platform. This report is a critical
next step in his vision of how content management
will be transformed.
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