The SaaS CMS model really shakes things up and will shift much of the burden for CMS implementation to the hosted software vendor, it seems. The topics we discuss at the upcoming CM Pros Summit need to include the SaaS way of thinking. I trust all of you plan to attend the event and participate in the discussion.

As always, I have found the CM Pros Summit to be a very educational event for vendors and their sales staff. Only when sales teams truly understand real projects potential customers would like to tackle can they position their products as potential solutions. With that said, I hope to see you all in San Francisco this April.

Thanks—and keep the conversation moving.

For those of you reading along (and lurking without participating)—welcome! Please consider checking out the Astoria Software blog (thanks Chip!) for some interesting articles also worthy of your attention. And, don’t miss Evaluating, Implementing and Deploying a Content Management System, a recent whitepaper from Crown Peak (thanks Rob!). And, of course, our friends at DocZone have an article of interest in Clientside News (thanks Dan!).

Absolutely.  Any CMS (hosted or otherwise) should now be able to bridge that gap effectively.  Speaking just from the SaaS side of the fence – the only challenge that you’ll find is that SaaS vendors are almost exclusively focused on “web” content management -rather than ECM.  This is because of the inherent “limitation” of a browser-based interface.  That’s not to say that SaaS based web cms solutions can’t manage digital assets – many do a great job at them including versioning, rollback, image manipulation, meta data management etc.. etc… But, for the obvious reason, you won’t effectively use a hosted CMS for managing things like (for example) a large repository of high-resolution images… There’s some subtlety here – but won’t belabor that in this post. 

However, on the plus side… A relatively sophisticated SaaS CMS provider will give you MUCH more control over your web properties than the more traditional players ever did.  So, gone are the days of two editors to manage content vs. navigation, or an editor to manage HTML vs. XML etc.. etc… Any good CMS offered as a hosted service should be able to publish in multiple formats, multiple languages, manage multiple web sites, navigation etc.. etc…

Hope that’s helpful….

Prior to DocZone, most of my experience has been in systems integration and/or vendor implementation services for XML/SGML content management systems. In 70+ implementation projects, the very fastest implementation was 6 months to get into “full production” (where the client is using the new system exclusively). In fact, one of the reasons we started DocZone.com was to be able to offer a “quick deployment” methodology.

Now, our standard implementation is between 30-90 days, depending on the complexity of the environment. Relatively straightforward DITA-based applications for multilingual technical documentation and online help are now averaging 30-45 days to full production deployment…something that I would never be able to dream of in the traditional software implementation model.

As users gain experience, it is easy to then modify and adapt the environment based on what the group has learned. Customers can complete this work themselves, or work with Astoria experts via a brief live Web meeting.

As a vendor, I see that On-Demand has greatly assisted our customers with the rapid adoption of their new applications balancing industry standard approaches with the requirements of an organization.

Great question. I can only speak for DocZone, of course, but in our case the answer is YES. We provide two options with our standard licensing model:

1) We bundle in a browser-based native XML editor with our solution as part of our standard monthly license fee. This is a full-featured XML/DITA editor that has the same capabilities as other commercial products (e.g., XMetaL, Arbortext, etc.)

2) We also support, at no additional fee, a tight integration with many of the leading desktop XML editors, including XMetaL, Arbortext/Epic, XMLspy, and several others. It provides the ability to browse the DocZone repository from these desktop tools, as well as create links to reusable components, images, etc. that are stored in DocZone.

I used to work in an Epic Editor shop that bridged to Chrystal Navigator, so you could perform certain Navigator functions from within Epic. Do SaaS solutions also provide the opportunity to bridge to your editing software?

What a great question – and at the risk of sounding a bit like Jeff Foxworthy… Here are the ways to know if you really are a Saas User… If you have a GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail or any other hosted email account, you’re already a SaaS User… And, if you use salesForce.com to manage customers, file your taxes using any of Intuit’s online services or if your company uses ADP for payroll processing – you’ve already made the leap to being a SaaS user that puts critical data across the network. 

And, the only other point I’d make is that we don’t find most customers using the SaaS model to demonstrate the benefits of an installed model.  In fact, that seems to be the actual oxymoron.  The SaaS model for content management tends to demonstrate (quite effectively) the <euphemism> inefficiency </euphemism> of the installed software model.  But then, as you might expect, I’m biased that way.

Our customers have been quite satisfied with the level of data security that is mentioned in Diane’s article, and the compelling arguments of rapid setup time and much lower cost to get into a production environment greatly outweigh any perceived risks of offsite data storage.

http://www.opsource.net/saas/summit2007/info/

Also, the Software and Information Industry Association is holding a conference in San Francisco in April where they will be discussing topics such as:  “From Desktop to Webtop”, “Enterprise 2.0”, “Open Source”, “Software as a Service”, and “Globalization”.

Here’s the link info on this summit:

http://www.siia.net/s4/2007/default.asp