3 Reasons Why Open Source Software Delivers Where Proprietary Software Fails

"Yes, you have to pay a fee for my software but I’m going to make sure that it is available, running fast and up-to-date”, says Michael Assad, CEO of Agility CMS, in a recent article of his. The piece explores the differences between Open Source and proprietary content management systems, voicing concerns about OSS and showcasing benefits of proprietary. I don’t agree with Mr Assad at all: In the long term, proprietary software is dead. The whole model is so deeply flawed that I am amazed that people still buy proprietary CMSs. Let me explain why.

Open Source is the better development model

It starts with how a content management system is developed. Nobody ever sees the source code of a proprietary CMS. It is potentially bound to be horrible, because developers can easily and comfortably hide behind their unintelligible, bad code. They make sure they keep their job. In open source, there will always be people looking at your code - and you know it, so you better make sure it is at least decent.

Developers are artists and craftsmen. They want to share their work and discuss the best way to tackle a challenge. They know of the cost of writing bad software. In an open source company, they will avoid it because their name is attached to the code, for everybody to see. Any future employer can look at how they work and if their skills are any good. Does this help writing better code than in a proprietary company? You bet it does. In your company, developers are probably forbidden to show their code to anybody outside the company. That is bad for them, bad for the code and bad for your product.

Open Source is open and extensible by default

Open Source code is written to be extended, because that is how the model works. Our partners can do fantastic custom implementations and extend the CMS according to a client’s need - because the code is there to look at and to be worked with. Closed Source code is written such that it works for a specific functional requirement (especially if you outsource your development!). In the long term, your software will suffocate on its own gluttony (one example of hundreds: Vignette).

Open Source delivers on the promise

Sales of proprietary software over-promise, and the product under-delivers. Always. Never in my 30+ years in business have I seen it the other way round. Why? Because sales gets paid for selling, so they sell anything the customer wants. Then the primary goal becomes to simply hack the stuff to fulfill the sales promise and there it is - another feature in a bloated mess. As long as a feature runs, it is good enough for sales to sell it. But ultimately, it is another nail in the coffin of your proprietary CMS.

With Open Source, you get the better product ...

So here is the way it works for us: our developers are proud of what they do. They share it with everybody who wants to see it. They have open discussions with those that care to engage (you know Joy’s law: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else”). This means they are happy and motivated to do the work they do. They build the foundation to help others implement anything they need. This is turn means the system is highly adaptable - the foundation for business agility.

A great product almost sells itself. Not as fast as your sales force can press a proprietary system into the market, but it will spread – by word of mouth. Combine this with a sustainable business model - ours is dual licensing subscription, a business model Magnolia pioneered for applications, which meanwhile is pretty common in the OS world. It allows us to keep costs low, double every two years in size and revenue and have a long term perspective on our business and product, which benefits the customers, the implementation partners and us (we actually sleep well at night).

... and Open Source vendors are the better companies.

Incidentally, most companies these days are externally funded (VC etc). Hard to see how the interest of the financiers aligns with those of the customers of a proprietary CMS. Magnolia never had external funding. We can follow our vision independently.

All these factors allow us to significantly invest in the future of our product, which will address the common concern (also voiced in Assad’s article) that CMSs are too difficult to use. For a glimpse into our biggest release yet (scheduled for June 20) look at http://www.magnolia-cms.com/five. And we are not talking Wordpress here, but a platform that powers some of the world's most demanding virtual presences. We are simply, slowly but strongly building the world's best CMS. Not saying we are there yet, but we'll get there. And it being Open Source is a big part of that journey.

Sign up here so you don't miss my next blog post: 

CMS deconstructed: is user experience all that remains?

In the last couple of years, more and more functions that are typically part of a bigger product have been "extracted" from such products and released as service available on the web, often for free. Take for example video publishing. No longer is it strictly necessary to have your own infrastructure to publish videos on the web – services like YouTube or Vimeo can be utilized, often for free. The same is true for  much of  the functionality found for example in a content management system or web experience management suite:

• Video publishing: Youtube, Vimeo…
• Image editing & publishing: Flickr…
• Task Manager: Remember the Milk
• File Sharing: Dropbox
• Document Management: Google Apps
• Analytics: Google Analytics
• Comments:  IntenseDebate
• Project Management: Basecamp
• Publishing: tons of hosting providers
• … uncounted others for every aspect you can imagine

Photo ©Boris Kraft. All rights reserved.

So you could say there is a trend to deconstruct content management (there is also an opposite trend, building suites that try to do everything you ever need, but I'll discuss that in a future blog post).

One very recent example is the real time web. There actually are cloud services that do nothing more than allow your content to be refreshed on the client without the user reloading a page (remember the Push web?). Great for instance for live coverage of events. This functionality clearly should and will be delivered by any good ol' CMS worth its salt sooner or later. Still it apparently is an urgent enough business objective to have spawned companies that do nothing else (not a long term viable business proposition I'd assume, but I digress)

If you take that trend to the extreme, all functionalities that you find in a software like Magnolia could eventually become individual web services provided by a host of companies. Maybe we have a company that offers workflow on the web (been waiting for that for at least 10 years), companies offering JCR storage, services to write rich text snippets and others to publish them. You get the picture: theoretically we could move all the individual bits and pieces of a product into cloud services. 

For the sake of pleasing our imaginative minds, assume that a vendor like Magnolia follows suite and keeps reducing the functionality provided by the product, opting instead to integrate a web service. To some extent, that has already happened – for instance, Magnolia uses CampaignMonitor to run email campaigns, IntenseDebate for commenting (we additionally provide our own commenting module), and Google Analytics for analytics and A/B testing. 

Continue down this road and all that eventually remains is a shell for the various pluggable web services. And what is a shell but a user interface?

So, provided one day a CMS is only a UI on web services, wouldn't that mean that the user interface is the most important part of the product? If every CMS is using the same web services (or allows you to pick from the same such services), the only difference between them will be the user interface.

Not that I believe that will actually happen (otherwise we'd no be developing so much functionality for Magnolia Five), but either way our focus on providing the best looking and best working user interface in the industry certainly allows me to sleep well even if it would.

Thoughts?

PS: we have a great event upcoming in Miami. Hope to see you there!

On Company Transformations, Rubber Boots and Perspective

Every company that wants to survive in a competitive market eventually needs to adapt to changing environments. Examples abound – Nokia, which went from rubber boots maker to global mobile phone giant may seem an extreme example, but a good indicator of how drastic such changes can be. Other examples include Berkshire Hathaway or even IBM, which narrowly survived more than once only due to drastic course changes.

Nokia Rubber Boots
Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/27836510@N07/

Now Magnolia is far from being an aging multinational behemoth. But nonetheless adapt we must, and have done so successfully in the past, usually in a very conscious way. For instance we decided in 2006 that we shed our project business to focus on building the best CMS on the market. It was no easy decision, because projects directly translate into revenue, which is why most of our competitors love to do projects.

But this was to the benefit of our partners, who provide these services without us competing against them, and to our customers, who get software that is no longer driven by project features ending up in a product. Shedding our project business has allowed Magnolia to work on Magnolia 5 with vision, rigor and bravery, something we could not have done would we not have transformed Magnolia from a service company to a product vendor.

So here we are, transforming our company once more, this time in a subtle way, but one that is all the way more powerful. Until summer 2011, we were basically adding features to a product. The main discussions from a product manager perspective focussed on which feature to add next in order to stay relevant in a very agile, demanding and complex environment. Should we add Facebook support? Become more social? Do we need to offer a SAAS version? Should we rather integrate Salesforce or Hybris? Is personalization or multi-variate testing the more relevant feature for our existing or future customers?

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done– Steve Jobs in Fortune, Mar. 7, 2008 

Every product company has to make such decisions. At Magnolia, we successfully ignored many trends to focus on building an enterprise CMS with technical sophistication and an intuitive user interface. So in summer 2011 we decided that Magnolia 5 should be built for the "generation mobile". We dumped all previous user interface design work and started over, this time from a mobile perspective. How would interaction work if a CMS would be as simple to use as a smart phone? The outcome is spectacular.

What is even more spectacular, is how changing our perspective has transformed us from a feature-focussed company to a vendor with its own vision and impact on the market. The way we think about content management today is different from a year ago. Yes we still need to implement features in order for our software to do anything useful. But features have become somewhat of an afterthought. It is not the features that make Magnolia 5 an outstanding product. It is the overall product experience that makes the difference.

Much like the first iPhone, some people will find that some features are lacking compared to the competition in the first release of Magnolia five. But if you focus on features, you miss the bigger picture, the long term perspective, the big waves that alter history. Much like Nokia, who certainly had more features in their smart phones in 2007 than the iPhone. Or Microsoft. Or Blackberry.

So here we are, the new Magnolia, a company that re-envisions content management for a world that is mobile first and where organizations extend their virtual presence on multiple channels to interact with their customers, members and citizens. This is a magnificent transformation and I am totally thrilled by its implications and possibilities.

Sign up here so you don't miss my next blog post: 

Disruptive Innovation: how mobile alters the cab business

I was in Manhattan back in 2007 to build up Magnolia Americas. One of the first things I did when I got there was to buy the new iPhone (even before I had an apartment or an office). I met a lot of cool people and had to move around in taxies quite a bit, and naturally some day in Brooklyn (there are generally no cabs in Brooklyn) I thought about an App to order a cab or limousine. I am used to toying around new ideas and take them apart, build business plans around them etc, so I took it as a nice intellectual challenge but not more.

Fast forward to 2012, and these kind of Apps have arrived big time. We have recently switched to a new taxi company in Basel, and with it came an app that allows me to order a taxi and see where it is and how long it takes to get to wherever I am – the kind of app I imagined back in 2007. Naturally I started to ask the cab drivers how the business model around their enterprise works and how these apps change their life.

So let me step back a bit. About a year ago I did a workshop with the CMS Experts Europe Group of Janus Boye about Disruptive Innovation. It has become a bit of a hobby of mine to look for disruptive technologies. So naturally I was interested in the disruptive nature of the taxi app.

First, taxis usually work in two modes – you either hitch one driving by, or you order one to pick you up. In New York or London demand for taxis is high, so if you are a cab driver, it suffices to drive around a block and you will have a new guest. There is little incentive for them to go through a call center to be dispatched to a client. In London for instance, most cab drivers will not be connected to a call center (one friendly cabby estimated that  20% of London cabbies are enrolled in such a scheme there).

A call center however is useful in smaller places. Cities like Basel. A cab driver pays a monthly fee for the call center, and the call center dispatches taxies to clients. In Germany a cab driver pays e.g. 450 € (580 USD) per month to the call center in order to get a supply of clients. In Basel, the fee is nearly twice s much at 1000 CHF (1070 USD). The taxi drivers have little alternatives to the call center services to get business here.

Now enter the app. The app connects the client (me) with the cab driver circumventing intermediaries like the call center. I haven't researched their fee structures in detail, but from what I hear, for instance in Germany the cab driver pays about 1$ in fees per ride initiated through the app to the app provider. While this might not seem like a big money saver, its main value for the taxi drivers is that the fee is per ride.

In Germany, if you take a three week holiday, you still pay the monthly 580USD for the call center. If you only work part time, same thing. The call center, in other words, doesn't care if you work or not. The app however does.

And the taxi drivers seem to love the new way of doing business. First, if they just stop on the road and pick up a passenger, they will not have to pay anybody anything. Same for all sick times, vacations or other times they don't work. However, if they need to rely on a third party to get a guest, they just wait until the next request on their mobile comes in and pay 1$ for it. This is a great value proposition for them, and naturally in Germany, cab drivers are using the app pretty much everywhere. The call centers don't like it, but what can they do?

Well, in Switzerland, they simply forbid the use of the app independent of the call center. In other words, the app I use goes to the call center, they notify the taxi driver and dispatch her to me.

Is this the right approach? Will it save the taxi call centers long term? What should they do? Is there anything they actually can do?

The mobile and the taxi app are disruptive to the business of the call center. The "disruptive" part  means that it change the nature of how things get done. Unless you change as well, you will not survive. I understand that the Swiss taxi center tries to use their dominance to stem the tide, but I believe resistance is futile. Their dispatch service simply is no longer needed.

Let me end with a little story on Kodak and Fujifilm. Both companies at their heyday were quite comparable, one quintessential American, one Japanese film maker. Kodak actually invented the digital camera! Today, Kodak is dead (what a shame), Fujifilm is striving. Why?

They both new at about the same time that change was inevitable. The digital camera would be disruptive for their film business. Surprisingly, Kodak failed to act decisively and forcefully, whereas Fujifilm did. Let's skip an analysis of what Kodak did wrong (lot's of things for sure) in their demise. What did Fujifilm do? They basically said: film as we know it is dead. How can we apply our considerable knowledge, processes, relationships and intellectual property elsewhere? And they did come up with two interesting business ideas that they followed through with – one in cosmetics (turns out the human skin and film have similar needs and characteristics) and one in flat panel displays, where Fujifilm has developed a film that increases the viewing angle of the display which is market leading.

My advice to call centers: assume dispatching taxis to clients is a dead business proposition. What can you provide that will still be useful? Then act fast and decisively.

These days when I need a cab I simply download an app and press a button. Life has become much easier for this weary traveller. Where did you recently see the disruptive nature of mobile at work?

Sign up here so you don't miss my next blog post: 

Why Magnolia 5 is mobile first

At the Magnolia Conference 2012 we presented the first look at Magnolia five and stated that Magnolia  5 was developed with a mobile first approach. There were two drivers for this approach:

1. We want to bring the ease-of-use of a smartphone to the desktop. If you compare today's bloated interfaces of enterprise software with the fun-to-use, task-oriented apps on your iPhone you will immediately realize the attraction of the latter. 
2. But there is a second attraction to developing enterprise software from a mobile perspective: the fact that you can actually use the software on a mobile device! 

So our goal was not only to make Magnolia easier to use on the desktop, but also to fully enable the same experience on your tablet computer. There has been ample research into the subject matter in recent years, and here are some quotes I presented at the keynote that highlight where the journey is taking us.

Mobile knowledge workers currently account for more than 60% of the total workforce in Brazil, Germany, India and Japan and more than 70% of the total workforce in the United States – Infotrends Jan 2011

These numbers are already more than a year old, which in terms of the mobile revolution is like a decade in desktop computing. Even if the Europeans by and large work from desktop computers, the same is not true for the rest of the world, and in any case, it is changing rapidly, everywhere, because the advance of mobile also changes the nature of business, as the next quote highlights:

Mobile applications will drive major transformation in the way businesses operate by delivering … relevant information to employees and customers – Gartner: “Effects of Mobility on Information Management”

Now these have been two good quotes why we want Magnolia 5 to run on mobile. Here is one that fits our other motivation, ease-of-use:

(Apple's iPad is) changing user expectations for how they interact with their content management systems – Gartner: “Tablets and Smartphones Are Changing How Content Is Created, Consumed and Delivered”

As you probably realize by now, what we do is what needs to be done. The future of content management (and enterprise software in general) will not look like your desktop software from the 90s, and I think we can all agree that is a good thing.

I spoke to a close friend recently, who told me that their company's Asian workforce is now exclusively equipped with iPads. They are no longer equipped with laptops. Probably the foremost reason is the lower total cost of ownership. Whatever their exact motivation, the fact remains that there is a workforce of an estimated 4000 staff being equipped with iPads instead of laptops. This is the trend that we see. And that is why Magnolia five is built mobile first.

PS: I'll be in London the next few days at the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration summit. Feel free to touch base with me there.

More good stuff? My next post is about the disruptive nature of mobile in an unexpected area. Sign up here so you don't miss it: 

Magnolia 5 – CMS as mobile apps platform

In the keynote (slides) at last week's Magnolia Conference Pascal and I spoke about Magnolia 5 and how we believe our CMS is an excellent starting point to develop mobile apps. For those that didn't make it to the conference (you missed a great event) let me quickly try to lay down my thoughts about the topic in this blog post.

So, Magnolia 5 aims to be the first CMS on the market that is "mobile first". That means that we have rethought and rewritten how content management should work in our mobile age. One aspect of it is that interaction patterns have been inspired by iOS, i.e. the iPhone and iPad. Another aspect is that the full CMS functionality will be available on the iPad and other tablets. With regard to interaction, our approach to reduce the complexity typically found in enterprise software, and to improve usability, is to use Apps as the building blocks of the CMS.

For a start, we provide an Apps Screen that allows you to launch the Apps you have access to. Additional apps can be added via Magnolia's module mechanism. Now, the big questions is why you should use Magnolia to write Apps.

Magnolia really is a UI on a broad set of services – we call them core services. For instance: 

• repository storage
• publishing / STK
• scalability
• security
• data import
• caching
• observation
• workflow / BPM

... and many more. If you think about it, many of these core services would be really useful when writing Apps for your mobile workforce (we call them Mobile Professionals or MoPros). Certainly the fact that Magnolia solves the provisioning issue is helpful (simply access Magnolia through the web browser of your device, log in, and you have access to all Apps you are allowed to use).

The security aspect is also interesting: Magnolia has user management that integrates with your organization through standards (JAAS) and has field level access controls in place.

Further, if as a MoPro you need to capture data (e.g. you are selling insurance policies), that data certainly should go back into some central form of storage – and we have that, using a standardized repository. If you then wish to publish, enrich or aggregate said data, Magnolia again is your friend.

Now, building these Apps is straightforward. We have defined a specific "content app" class that you can use as the basis for, well, content Apps. Content Apps basically allow you to manage any form of data or content through a standardized UI. All you need to do to create such an App is to define the data type. The UI will be rendered fully automatically.

On a lesser abstraction level, you have full control over your Apps (which means more work for you) but for straightforward Content Apps, Magnolia 5 indeed brings a lot to the table.

Apps can also use workflow (we will use jBPM in Magnolia 5), or use observation to react on any changes to any content.

So once you put all of this together, you probably agree that using a CMS like Magnolia provides excellent benefits to your organization if you want to provide access to corporate data for your mobile professionals. In any case, we fully embrace the mobile age and are excited that we are entering the Mobile App platform space with Magnolia 5.

You can download a developer preview of Magnolia 5, watch the fantastic teaser videos or read the docs on how to write a Magnolia 5 App. We plan to release a Magnolia 5 beta in November, so stay tuned for more.

And let me know what you think about the Apps platform idea.

HyperSmash.com

Virtual Presence Management vs. Web Experience Management

I have introduced Virtual Presence Management (VPM) in two previous blog posts (The VPM Turing Test and the VPM maturity scale) and we published a technology brief about virtual presence management on the Magnolia CMS site. It is even part of Magnolia's brand promise.

With our focus so strongly on Virtual Presence, you might wonder where that leaves us on Web Experience Management. We actively participate in the Web Experience Management Interoperability standardization effort,  which we co-sponsor through our OASIS membership. But this blog post is not about our involvement there, it is about the differences between Web Experience Management and Virtual Presence Management.

WEM is all about personalization – bringing the right content to the right person at the right time. Its driver is the organizations wish to optimize (usually in terms of revenue) each interaction with their customers.

LeShop allows you to buy exactly the same articles that you get in the local supermarket. A great example of Virtual Presence by the Migros retail group.

VPM on the other hand provides people the opportunity to interact with an organizations through virtual channels like the web or mobile instead of a physical interaction. It supports the drive of today's organizations to "virtualize" their presence, i.e. to reduce their dependency on physical resources like brick & mortar stores or call centers. It also helps people to do "business" on their own terms – where, when and how they want to interact with a company. This is paramount in a world that is increasingly mobile, and increasingly global.

Where WEM tries to provide an experience that is tailored to the visitor, Virtual Presence Management looks at the world from the organization's perspective.  How can an organization generate more value for their clients/members/citizens? I believe it can do so by opening up more of their services and processes to "virtual" channels, e.g. the web, mobile web, apps or any other form of "virtual" interaction. Recent Open Data and E-Government initiatives are examples of opening up and providing  access to data and processes for the good of citizens. This clearly is not about web experience. It is about adding value using existing data and processes by bringing them to the web and mobile.

Long lines could be a thing of the past if the DMV would have a Virtual Presence.
Image http://morefunthanblackboard.wordpress.com/2010/02/10/waiting-in-line-at-the-dmv/

For instance, if you are an expat, say from the UK, working in the US, you might be interested to watch the BBC news after you come home from work. If BBC only provides their news show through broadcast TV, you typically have no chance to watch them (since they are in a different time zone). A Virtual Presence activity for BBC would be to make the news available through the web or mobile on demand. This is in fact also a good example of VPM's focus on opening up an organization's data and processes. The news have already been produced, it is already available in digital form at BBC, so why not open it up to the virtual channels and in this way provide benefit to or widen your audience?

This is exactly what Magnolia's customers have been doing for a while now. When we were analyzing why our customers chose Magnolia over alternatives, we realized that they were typically working on  virtual presence. Magnolia's open attitude and our technological toolchain are the foundation for a solid virtual presence strategy.

Take navy.com, or navyreserve.com. These sites provide deep back-end integration, they go way beyond a traditional brochure ware site. For instance, you can take the Navy Life-Ops personality profile test, or use calculators to determine pay. Another example would be ticket.se, an online store that allows you to book tickets. Recently, the City of Lausanne has launched a new public administration site based on Magnolia, which offers all sorts of citizen services online. Their expectations for its use have been exceeded within 2 month by 25%.

So back to WEM. Web experience management is like thinking about the choice of drinks you wish to serve a passenger on a flight. Yes, a passenger might be happy to have her favorite drink when she gets on the plane. But she might be even happier not to have to hop on the plane in the first place.

So think about the trip, not the drink.

BTW, next week at the Magnolia Conference, Virtual Presence will be part of the keynote, where we will add a new dimension to virtual presence management (stay tuned). We'll also have an experts panel discussing VPM. So see you there!

Enjoy the Party with Magnolia CMS, Skip the BYOD Hangover (part 2)

In my last blog post, I discussed the BYOD challenges being faced by many enterprises, together with the needs of mobile professionals to be able to interact with content swiftly and in an error-free manner. While the typical solution to these problems is to build and deploy native apps, this is not a perfect solution. Key issues include the cost of supporting multiple platforms, the difficulties of ensuring that apps are correctly provisioned, and providing a seamless interaction experience across multiple apps and devices.

With Magnolia 5, we hope to offer a better solution to these issues.

Magnolia 5 Apps

Magnolia provides answers where others leave a trail of failed silo app implementations. In an industry first, Magnolia 5 introduces a revolutionary new interaction concept for enterprise software, based on the simplicity of Apps. All of Magnolia’s functionality is neatly divided into task-based Apps. Apps reduce complexity and allow a highly personalized user experience. They are also an excellent mechanism to customize Magnolia while maintaining the upgrade path. Such custom Apps provide a seamless user experience and can be directly integrated into your business processes. This will reduce the learning curve and the cost of operations.

Apps in Magnolia are written in HTML5 using Vaadin, “a Java framework for building modern web applications that look great, perform well and make you and your users happy”. Since HTML5 is a standard, Apps in Magnolia work across all modern devices and browsers. As a widely adopted industry standard, it is future-proof. In stark contrast to proprietary solutions, standards ensure that talent is either readily available or learning these technologies is seen as an asset to any employee’s career.

Security and Open Standards

Apps are provisioned through Magnolia. Mobile professionals simply log into Magnolia through their web browser (or, if preferred, a “native app wrapper” of Magnolia installed on their device) and are presented with the Apps they may access. If a new App is added to the Magnolia server, it will automatically show up under the user’s Apps if access is granted. No additional device specific installation is required. It is easy to control access not only to Apps but all data since Magnolia has highly granular access control.

With all the above benefits, here is one that tops them all: The core services of Magnolia CMS, e.g. content management, asset management, messaging, versioning, observation, security, caching, workflow, publishing etc. are a unique value proposition to build custom, content-centric Apps for your organization. Where existing frameworks address the problem of building and provisioning Apps, possibly across multiple devices, Magnolia allows you to build Apps that are standards-compliant HTML5, make it very easy to provide specific functionality to specific groups, ensure that updates are instant, user interaction is unified and seamless and Mobile Professionals can work on the same data that office workers access.

The journalist reporting a story can simply launch an article app, take a snapshot and add a couple of lines of text, and push the news through the internal approval workflow to publish it on your news site. Notes taken by a doctor on his or her iPad are no longer separate from the patient data but part of their record. And regrettably, the parking ticket might be in your inbox the moment a police officer registers a parking violation.

In short, if you're a CIO worried about the morning-after hangover of the BYOD party, don't be. The party's just beginning for mobile users, and Magnolia’s exciting cocktail of open, mobile-friendly technologies is just what you need to enjoy it!

Enjoy the Party with Magnolia CMS, Skip the BYOD Hangover

Do you have a smartphone or tablet? Do you use it to buy movie tickets or groceries, catch up with news and read your email? Have you ever used it to jot down quick meeting notes, update your Facebook stream or upload a photo to your Web site?

Chances are, you answered yes to at least one of those questions. And if you did, you're not alone. A 2011 study by InfoTrends found that "mobile knowledge workers currently account for more than 60% of the total workforce in Brazil, Germany, India and Japan and more than 70% of the total workforce in the United States. Forecast projections show these regions are expected to show continued growth and penetration through the 2014 period."

Who Are These Mobile Users, Anyway?

It might tempting to discount this as a passing trend, but look around you - in the bus, the train, the workplace, the restaurant - and you'll realize the pervasiveness of mobile. And if you look a little closer, you'll realize that these "mobile workers" can actually be classified into two broad segments:

• “Mobile Consumers” are those who use mobile access for non-work purposes. Examples include making mobile payments for groceries, getting driving directions and maps, reading the tablet version of the New Yorker while commuting, and so on. These users like mobile-friendly Websites that have intuitive design and workflows and are designed for small(er) screens.
• “Mobile Professionals” are those who treat their mobile device as an extension of their workplace, using it to receive and send business-related information. Examples include journalists recording interviews on their mobile phones, doctors reviewing patient data and taking notes, and police officers registering parking violations. For these users, it's important that interaction is intuitive and simple so that errors can be avoided. Also, access needs to be scalable, secure and tightly integrated with back-office systems.

How does this trend relate to content management? Well, most Mobile Professionals are using their mobile devices to create or interact with content. Think of patient records being updated at bed side, insurance brokers jotting down client details, or journalists writing a short article right where the action takes place. These are activities that should integrate seamlessly with value-generating business processes to provide the biggest benefit and fastest time to market at the lowest cost.

Granted, there are many providers today that try to solve these issues through app-building frameworks. However, at Magnolia, we believe the problem is not building apps, but providing the content management infrastructure to manage content creation, access and publishing processes.

The BYOD Challenge

CIOs face distinct challenges from the growing trend of mobile usage, both amongst company customers and Mobile Professionals. Most CIOs are already aware of the need to make the enterprise's customer-facing Website mobile-friendly, to ensure that both prospective and actual customers can access the information they need without hindrance. Magnolia has provided support for mobile sites, in addition to existing sites and channels, from a single source of content for a while.

However, faced with the new trend of BYOD, CIOs now also need to ensure that internal resources, such as the company intranet, are accessible and usable through employee-owned mobile devices and that interaction with their back-end systems can be provided on the go.

One option to do so is to build native apps. While this is certainly a valid approach, it introduces a host of issues, such as the cost of supporting multiple platforms, ensuring that the right groups of people have access to the right apps (this is called “provisioning”), and providing a seamless interaction experience across multiple apps and devices to lower the learning curve and reduce data entry errors.

With Magnolia 5, we’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about these problems, and we think we’ve cracked them. More in my next post.

The Virtual Presence Maturity Scale

The Web is not what it used to be. It is no longer enough to build static brochureware websites. Businesses today need deep back-end integration to provide a unique, valuable experience to customers. Have you seen how Amazon replaces bookstore chains, Craigslist replaces newspaper classifieds and online travel sites replace travel agencies? Common to these examples is the integration of business logic processes into online channels, making them directly accessible to site visitors.

At Magnolia we call this virtual presence management (VPM). We think VPM is very important. Businesses should understand how to get better at it.

In order to know where you should go, you need to first understand where you stand. Last week, I published a blog post about a Turing Test for Virtual Presence as a first introduction. Extending this, I propose a model for measuring virtual presence. It is a 5-level scale modeled after the Capability Maturity Model, a popular tool for measuring how well an organization can execute a process.


There are several levels, ranging from a simple brochureware website to a born-digital company. Let’s look at some examples.

1. The first level is a static brochureware website. Typically the only thing a customer can do on such as a website is gather basic information about the business. There is no e-commerce or interaction. Example: Snyder & Brandt, P.A. attorneys provides just a phone number and a description of their services.
2. At level 2 businesses are aware of VPM and are experimenting with it. But they have not fully incorporated all their business processes to the Web. The website might have interactive features but does not allow you to complete transactions. For example, Morrisons Supermarket chain in the U.K. has a versatile website but you cannot buy any products online.
3. At level three are companies that already have a deep virtual presence but some decisive parts are still missing. The last part of the transaction such as picking up a ticket cannot be done online. Example: Optimus Primavera Festival allows you to buy a concert ticket online but you have to pick it up from a box office.
4. Level four is very close to full virtual presence. In fact, here you find businesses that are deliberately physical in some respect of their service offering. For example, when Axa Winterthur sells life insurance the company prefers to complete the process face-to-face with the client even though they could complete the transaction through the web.
5. Businesses at level 5 are totally virtualized and often don't even have a physical presence. If they have a concrete shop, you can buy the same things as in the online shop. The reach of virtual presence at this level makes the two realms indistinguishable. Example: Amazon

We think that the maturity scale model has some key advantages:

• It makes the concept of virtual presence easier to understand.
• It shows that VPM is a gradual process, not an ON/OFF decision.
• It can help businesses evaluate their current level of VPM.

However, the model also has drawbacks. First of all, it is quite simplistic. There are companies that fit on more than one level. The highest level is not always the goal either: a company may reach optimal virtual presence at level 4.

What do you think about the model? Which level is your company on? Read the whole Virtual Presence Management Tech Brief and leave a comment.