September 27, 2003

Almost CMSes

CMSWatch's Tony Byrne has an interesting article on products that incorporate some CMS functionality. Byrne covers the Xythos Web File Server (a WebDAV implementation), Oracle's Internet File System and Portal, and Macromedia's Contribute. The latter is the most interesting to me, in that a number of the organizations I work with (including my own) either use or want to use Contribute. Byrne points out that Contribute only really works for static pages, throwing the notion of content reuse out the window. And, more interestingly, he addresses the concept of distributing web publishing throughout the organization:

The distributed webmaster organizational pattern raises numerous cautionary flags from an enterprise viewpoint, and I don't think it will survive a few more years of web publishing process improvements. However, Contribute can make that model more scalable and efficent in the meantime.

He's right to point out the issues with the model, but I think he's over-estimating the speed in which web publishing improvements will occur. Lots of places are still in the stone ages (okay...mid-90s), and quite happy there.