Re: RE Ektron's .NET/ActiveX Solution

Funny how the subject line and content of this thread has changed to 
some kind of marketing message.

My comments in general can be applied to all CMS vendors, but I was 
responding to particulars of a post.  When I think CMS I do not think 
ActiveX WYSIWYG editor, but embedded DHTML editor.  When organizations 
look for .NET they are generally looking for related technologies using 
open, future-facing standards such as DOM/DHTML/JavaScript, XML, XSL and 
Web Services - not ActiveX.  Connotations are critical.  While I may 
have gotten carried away with irrelevant details, I wouldn't have posted 
if I had not found two statements boldly misleading, just as I find the 
following statement to be a half-truth:

"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."

The ActiveX control seems to be applied to a greater number of features 
such as your template editor; are there plans to rewrite this tool in a 
more open technology, even a .NET client?  It looks like the .NET CMS 
developer guide is 176 pages; I seem to remember the ActiveX 
configuration documentation being somewhat longer?  I also find this 
misleading:

"(which, by the way, works in IE, Netscape, and Firefox as well)"

Which platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows, etc.) support the Ektron 
controls?  With what difficulty and rights must it be installed?  Is 
that greater or less than the number of browsers that already have Flash 
installed?  I agree with you that Ektron's primary value lies in the 
ActiveX controls, but what is the future of ActiveX?  I guess I am a 
purist; I want to go with a technical leader, not a mix with proprietary 
technologies (ok, maybe .NET even on the server is not exactly open, but 
it's...better).  When I last evaluated CMS products I requested a demo 
of the Ektron .NET product, but unfortunately the technician showed me 
the previous product for unknown reasons.  He mentioned the products are 
the same but one uses .NET.  My client at the time wanted to avoid this 
ActiveX as it had been a problem in the past, but I went through the 
demo to see if there were any features that would make up for this.  As 
soon as he dropped into code it looked proprietary, though it may have 
been classic ASP which I never learned.  Although it may not be listed 
in RFPs, I would expect organizations to prefer vendors committed to a 
single technical platform for development, enhancement, support, etc.

Allowing vanity URLs to be applied to data is different from defining 
that data in an information architecture.  This can be important to 
structured retrieval by other systems.  Links are not always the best 
way of structuring.

I didn't say I prefer Documentum or any of the other products mentioned 
- I really feel I am working with the best technology now.

That's is a great feature for search, but seems like it could be applied 
easily to most CMS products.  I think the product architecture is more 
important than any specific feature.  One problem with features is that 
they clutter the UI, creating a huge button bar or complex menus, or 
worse, new windows. 

OK, I will stop "attacking" Ektron. 

In general I have seen CMS vendors mislead clients on a number of 
occasions, referring to implementation and customization as simply 
configuration and extension, or even saying unsupported features are 
supported.  At one point the CMS market became apparent to vendors of 
various products such as source code management tools not designed with 
CMS concepts, which were then modified and sold in this market by 
non-technical salespeople.  With over one thousand CMS products 
available, not counting the number which service-oriented vendors may 
provide, customers have a difficult choice and must be very careful of 
their long-term requirements.  Consider economic viability in vendor 
evaluation, but technical architecture may be more important as it will 
lead to profitability, just as a companies past financial record is not 
always the best indicator of its future.  If I remember correctly, the 
market leader was not profitable for some time.  For significant 
(enterprise) projects, an open, modular architecture supporting feature 
extension is often more important than a UI/product incorporating every 
possible feature.  For very small projects, choose based on exactly 
required features.  For very large projects, consider vendors with 
clean, pure .NET (and maybe J2EE) architectures, powerful client- and 
server- event models and APIs, a variety of available optional fee and 
free modules, facilities for easily extending product capabilities and 
integrating with other systems as well as any other aspects that make 
developers in training say "sweet!".  I personally think vendors should 
primarily describe their architectures, differentiating factors, 
limitations, flaws and missing features in their products to determine 
what corrections customers are most interested in.  The sales people may 
not like it, but the technical people must be very candid with partners 
and customers regarding any restrictions as well as when correction is 
projected, how much implementation, upgrade and other work is required, 
client-side installations required, etc.  Any feedback received about a 
specific product should be used for improvement.  Vendors should be 
especially careful in describing their product on public forums, which 
is why I don't represent any company on this list - if I recommend a 
vendor product by name I post off-list.  We should all work in the best 
interest of web standards, but especially advocate the specific needs of 
our customers.

Tim Denby wrote:

>  
> 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
>>      
>>