RE Ektron's .NET Solution

What is this, Attack Ektron Week? ;^)  This is definitely a tangent from my
previous post, in which I was responding to Daniel's claim that Ektron is
not financially viable.  But I will respond to John's... comments... as
well.

> ...Are you 100% sure that it is just a .NET application, no old technology

CMS400.NET on the server is 100% .NET-based.  There are no COM objects or
pre-.NET technologies used and there is no unmanaged code, period.

So a web site built with the system is also 100% .NET-based and the team
building the site can take advantage of all IIS 6 / ASP.NET features like
remote debugging, output caching, databinding of CMS content objects to
DataGrids or DataLists or DropDownLists, etc.

John is possibly **confusing CMS400.NET with its non-.NET brother, CMS300**
(pardon the font theatrics - the following sentence does NOT apply to
CMS400.NET).  CMS300 has a layer of COM objects underlying everything that
allows the customer to build the web site in Cold Fusion, Classic ASP,
ASP.NET, PHP, or any combination of those languages, and additionally any
language like JSP that support the product's Web Services API.  But when we
got a taste of building ASP.NET sites with CMS300, and after we tested out
the wings that the .NET framework could give us for handling XML content, a
fully .NET-based product was inevitable and CMS400.NET was born.

The user interface to the product is 100% browser-based.  For users editing
and managing web content through Windows browser clients, yes we do use our
eWebEditPro Editor which is an ActiveX control (which, by the way, works in
IE, Netscape, and Firefox as well).  John says that use of ActiveX on the
client side means CMS400 isn't a .NET application.  Documentum uses our
ActiveX control, so does that mean Documentum is not a Java application?
No.

And need I even point out that the javascript used in DHTML, indeed all
client-side browser scripting, is neither Java nor .NET.

> Can I just unzip the installation media, drop it in my document root and
be up and running without setup.exe or reboot?

The installation media does a number of things in addition to unpacking the
system's files.  It offers the option to install MSDE if SQL server isn't
present, creates and populates the database, creates the IIS Application,
and makes sure that the database and filesystem permissions are configured
properly for the anonymous user as set in IIS.  We provide the SQL scripts,
etc. to perform any of these steps manually as well as a wizard to create
new sites after initial install.  The installation does not require a
reboot.

What I think John is asking here is whether the code in a CMS400 site is
self-contained under the web root.  It is.  We don't even register our
classes in the Global Assembly Cache.  So you can just zip up an entire
CMS400 site - simply the files under the web root - and move it to another
web server and unpack it.  All of the code will work on the new server, you
just need to perform the above configuration steps like you would for any
ASP.NET application that accesses a database and the file system.

> [no] proprietary scripting languages anywhere...

There were never any proprietary scripting languages anywhere in Ektron
products; one of our primary architectural objectives from the beginning of
the company has been to make sure that all of the coding our customers do is
in a standard web scripting language.  That keeps the learning curve nice
and gentle and minimizes staffing costs for the IT organization.

> "Ektron products are used in 850 of the top Fortune 1000 companies."
> Yes, but how many use the Ektron CMS?

The point here was to show that we have business relationships with 850 of
the Fortune 1000s.  This reinforces our viability as a company.

Many of these relationships we have with the Fortune 1000s came through our
partners or OEMs.  Ektron is good at building strong business relationships
that beget more strong business relationships.

So John is right, these Fortune 1000 companies don't all have the Ektron CMS
.  Yet.  Give us a year or two.  We're one of the fastest growing technology
companies both regionally and in the United States nationally.  Believe me,
I have seen us grow - I may not have a low Slashdot number but I have a low
Ektron number :^)

-----

Regarding structured content and content reuse, with respect to John he just
isn't familiar with this facet of our technology.  Structured content
formats are XML Schemas created via drag-and-drop form design in our
browser-based eWebEditPro+XML tool.  The fields are laid out by the user
(doesn't have to be a developer) with HTML and then the system
auto-generates an XSLT for displaying XML content of that type.  So if the
user designing the format doesn't use any rich-text HTML fields (out of the
12 field types to choose from) content and presentation are completely
separate with the content stored as an XML document and the presentation
details encapsulated in the XSLT.

In addition to the default XSLT presentation a developer can copy and modify
the XSLT code.  Or you can use ASP.NET for presentation instead of XSLT
(needless to say this is by far the easier way to do it, even for those of
us who are XSL junkies like myself).  In your codebehind you can load the
XML content into a .NET XmlDocument object and then databind individual
nodes of the XML to Label controls that you have positioned and formatted in
Visual Studio.

Easy design and application of the content structure, enforcement and
validation of that structure, and separation of content from presentation
are all essential aspects of acheiving a structured information architecture
within a web site.  But as John notes metadata tagging and search
capabilities are equally important.  In a site based upon structured content
the lines between metadata and the structured content itself become blurred.
One of the most powerful features that we have for leveraging structured
content in a CMS400-powered site is our XML Indexing engine.

The user designing the structured content format can tag any field so that
it is indexed.  This allows the developer to build a custom search form for
that content type - find all of the Medication Management policies that were
authored in the year 2000, reviewed within the last year, by authors with
the last name "Smith", that have the word "nursing" in the policy scope
field.  And weight the results by the number of fields matched.

Or on a retail web site build navigation controls that are dynamically
generated from content metadata - browse by product color, price range, or
manufacturer.  And the index results from the Ektron server control are data
bindable for .NET, of course.

And by the way we do all of this at a price much more reasonable than many
of our competitors.

John is correct that page URLs should be human readable and aesthetically
pleasing as Jakob Nielsen recommends.  That's why late last year we added a
URL Aliasing / vanity URLs feature to the product, which allows a user to go
to a content item and type in the desired URL.

So in many aspects of content structuring and reuse Ektron tools are the
best in the industry.  Granted there are a few of our competitors who are
better in some areas, whom we need to catch up to.  That's why we have a new
release with new features every few months.

Tim Denby
Ektron, Inc.


  -----Original Message-----
  From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of John
  Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 1:21 AM
  To: [email protected]
  Subject: Re: [CMS] [Microsoft-based solution for a portal +CMS
system]:Microsoft SharePoint portal + Microsoft CMS ?


  This probably belongs off-list as we work for competing vendors, but as
CMS, Internet, software and just general professionals we should ensure the
archives of this list are as accurate as possible.  I take issue with a
number of points in this post, although my experience with Ektron is
somewhat dated.  A lot of companies have been burned by vendors that
basically say anything in sales demos, etc.

  Is ektron.com built with this product?  Are you 100% sure that it is just
a .NET application, no old technology or proprietary scripting languages
anywhere in the product?  Can I just unzip the installation media, drop it
in my document root and be up and running without setup.exe or reboot?

  One apparent goal of .NET CMS products is to make content edits through a
browser.  For instance, external international translation agencies may be
using browsers other than IE.  Requiring that all browsers support ActiveX
controls largely defeats this purpose and means that this is not a .NET
product as this is a legacy technology.

  "We have more customer installations of our CMS software than any other
commercial CMS vendor."

  More than the market leader?  You're not calling EWebEditPro a content
management system, are you?

  "Ektron products are used in 850 of the top Fortune 1000 companies."

  Yes, but how many use the Ektron CMS?  Anyone who has worked with
EWebEditPro in an enterprise knows that SMS updates, standard builds and
other administrative processes can wipe Ektron software off client machines,
which is a major problem as admin rights are required for reinstallation.
If I remember correctly, it was still installing vbrun300.dll or something
on all clients and sometimes required reboot - not exactly 2005 technology.
After working with Interwoven  TeamSite for about 5 years, I just stopped
installing it on new machines after a while.

  Another critical aspect of CMS implementation is to increase consistency
and potential for data reuse by separating content from presentation through
data structuring.  EWebEditPro completely defeats this purpose as
demonstrated by a quick glance at almost any news articles on your site, for
instance:

  http://www.ektron.com/pressreleases.aspx?id=1964
  http://www.ektron.com/pressreleases.aspx?id=2052
  http://www.ektron.com/pressreleases.aspx?id=1512

  Notice how the location and date are formatted differently (err, this may
be corrected shortly after I post this, so I kept screenshots for anyone
interested).  If you browse through these news articles you are likely to
find many different formats of this leader, as the onus of formatting
control is now on the user of which there may be more than one, and not all
are cutting and pasting from old, correctly-formatted news articles.  This
is a minor example, but critically important as in the general case it
reduces the professional quality of the site.  Also, structured data is
important for parametric search (for instance, find all articles created in
2004 released from San Jose).  Note also that these are not very
user-friendly URLs, and they don't indicate any kind of hierarchy to search
engines which could be used for relevance ranking.  Maybe this was put
together hastily and is not Ektron best practice, as there must be a date
associated with these articles as it as in some cases they are filtered by
date.  Not exactly content re-use.  The more I look the less I like the
URLs.  For instance, without taking your eyes off this message, within 10
seconds tell me which of these URLs is the events page and which is the
contact us page:

  http://www.ektron.com/corporate.aspx?id=1004
  http://www.ektron.com/corporate.aspx?id=949

  I tend to wonder how users create links and how links are managed in such
a system.

  Worse than not structuring the data is not structuring the information
architecture.  Be sure to choose a CMS that lets you control what types of
records users are able to create in different areas - you probably don't
want someone creating job postings in the news area.  CMS products that
don't structure content are unlikely to structure information properly.

  Tim Denby wrote:
I am compelled to answer...

Ektron is one of the only commercial CMS vendors that has been profitable in
the last several years (Although I'll concede that Microsoft has been
profitable too ;^).  We have been profitable for the last three years out of
the six years we've been in business.

We have more customer installations of our CMS software than any other
commercial CMS vendor.

Look at the other major CMS systems on the market - Interwoven, Vignette,
Documentum, Silk Road, Medseek, Fatwire, and others - and look at the
WYSIWYG HTML editor control.  That's an OEM version of eWebEditPro or
eWebEditPro+XML, Ektron's HTML and XML editing controls respectively.  So
every time one of those CMS solutions is sold an Ektron product goes with
it.

Ektron products are used in 850 of the top Fortune 1000 companies.  We have
strong partners across the globe and our CMS is deployed on every continent.
(Okay, I'm not sure about Antarctica.)

We aren't Microsoft but our viability is beyond question.

Tim



-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Daniel Reardon
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 11:57 AM
To: Jerry Santelli; [email protected]
Subject: RE: [CMS] [Microsoft-based solution for a portal + CMS
system]:Microsoft SharePoint portal + Microsoft CMS ?


Jerry

Unbelievable!!!!!!

Your comments below are 100% , irrefutably incorrect regarding MCMS
future. We are on the Microsoft Global Advisory Council for Portals
advising Microsoft on the next version of CMS and SPS right now. I can
confirm there is further development and a very strong new release is
being built as I type. Although under NDA, rest assured a very strong
strategy is in place.

That said Ektron is 100% .NET based. However if you are concerned about
Microsoft's commitment to CMS (which is entirely unfounded!!!), surely
you must be equally concerned regarding not just the future of Ektron
CMS 400, but also Ektron as a company. Let's face it Microsoft are not
likely to go bust, I'm not so confident about Ektron.

Either way, I guess you choose!!!