"We're sorry, this helicopter has been checked out by someone else..."

Hi Nigel-

We updated it through 2010, but not since then. Much of the research is still germane; you can contact us via one of the links to the right to get access to the last version.

Regards,

Tony Byrne

Hey Christian-

You are surely right on that.

Unfortunately, that approach is endemic in the public-sector contracting segment. As one beltway-bandit CEO once told me, "Make the cash register ring, then figure out how to do the work..." Ugh.

Tony

Thanks, Tushar, for adding some valuable richness to the discussion. I might only disagree on the CQ5 authoring environment, but of course usability is very contextual.

Thanks again.

Tony

Hi Perttu-

Many thanks for adding your perspective.

Tony

Hi Daniel-

Many thanks for giving us the at-the-coalface viewpoint.

Cheers,

Tony Byrne

Good one... Thanks!

Tony

Thanks, for the comments, all.

@Bart, I agree that greater functionality in WCM tools is a positive development. Where I part ways is the notion that a single experience is going to satisfy all the various personas in a larger enterprise. The question then becomes: can the vendor who is selling to power-user decision-makers also deliver on a very simple interface for Jorge. Surprisingly, many cannot, or cannot easily.

@Perttu, Thanks for case study. I believe that university and government organizations should not have to turn to a framework like Django to obtain simple or custom interfaces. Fortunately, there are many simple CMS products in the market, and many of those have found good traction in higher ed, for example. But what if a university was more sophisticated, and they did want a more complex marketing platform for some internal constituents, while also satisfying their many casual contributors? Today this is a tough choice for them.

@Boris, I suspect you are right that task-based interfaces are the way out of this dilemma. It will be interesting to see, though, the level of effort to configure them.

@jochent, your argument about the problems of "dual interfaces" is a strong one. We haven't seen them work so well either. However, our clients find that progressive disclosure and hiding does not always deal with the issue of complexity; I think shaping experiences around tasks for people like Jorge holds more promise.

@Rasmus Similar to above, I'm not sure the core problem is interface scalability, but will keep an open mind... P.S. love the music analogy...

Hi @Former_Day-

Thanks for writing in! Adobe is certainly doing a lot right. Just not as much as they think they are...

Cheers,

Tony Byrne

Hey Rich,

Thanks for chiming in. We would tend to put Google as another platform that caters primarily to SMBs.

From there it's kind of hard to generalize, since many of these tools address a broad range of customer sizes. For example, some larger enterprises use WordPress for all their blogging (internal and external). That's why we have them listed under the "specialized" category on our vendor list page (http://www.realstorygroup.com/Research/Collaboration/).

Best wishes,

Tony Byrne
RSG