Re: CMS Differentiating Factors

Boris Kraft wrote:
>  From our experience (before we started Magnolia) I can say
> a) customization is always necessary to some degree unless your 
> requirements are low or your company is average (in the sense of "like 
> most others") because vendors will usually built what most companies (== 
> average) need

Well, just to contrast that I'd say 90% of our customers use our 
CMS/portal as it is out of the box. I suppose it depends on what you 
mean by "customization"? If you are saying anything that involves 
programming in some way that is done with typically less than 5% of all 
our installations.

We sell mostly to government (departments and municipalities), and they 
have VERY high requirements BUT they are also very similar, hence the 
possibility for us to productize this quite well. We also sell hosted 
environments to smaller companies, and they are "easier" in that they 
typically don't have very extravagant requirements, especially if all 
they want is a CMS and not a portal.

Even most of our integration techniques are done through point and 
click. The most advanced of our packaged integration portlets implements 
a proxy that allows for custom XSL transformation of the underlying 
content, but that's about it.

We don't make much money and support, and we don't have much to offer in 
terms of consulting services. So, our way to scale to lots and lots of 
customers is to simply make the tool as packaged and easy to use as 
possible, and it has worked out quite decently. My own estimation (which 
others will contest, I am sure) is that we are now nr 2 in Sweden after 
EpiServer, and gaining fast.

FWIW,
   Rickard