Content Management Systems and the Changing Web Landscape: Interview with Robert Bredlau, e-Spirit

March 5, 2009 Blog No Comments

In this exclusive interview with The Content Wrangler, Scott Abel talks with Robert Bredlau, enterprise content management expert with e-Spirit, makes of an industrial strength content management system used by organizations in the media, publishing, e-Commerce arenas. Robert and I chat a little about his firm, its products an services, and we discuss some of the major challenges people face when attempting to move from old school content mismanagement to a strict, systematic, rules-based approach to managing content as a business asset.

Scott: Robert, thanks for agreeing to chat with us today about content management. For those of our readers who don’t know who you are, tell us a little about yourself and your experience in the content industry.

Robert: Hi Scott, thanks for inviting me! Currently I work at e-Spirit, one of the leading content management companies. My main responsibility here is the development of business in strategic countries (e.g. UK, Scandinavia and the USA). I’ve worked in the CMS industry for almost 10 years, but have 15 years experience in business development, including three years based in the US.

Scott: I know that your firm, e-Spirit AG, is a provider of software tools designed to help organizations better manage and distribute business content quickly and effectively. But what exactly does your company do? What types of products/services do you provide? Tell us a little about each.

Robert: e-Spirit is the manufacturer of < ahref="http://www.firstspirit.de/internet/en/produkt/firstspirit/FirstSpirit.html">FirstSpirit, the advanced content management system for companies who set high expectations of their solutions. e-Spirit is a reputable, internationally-oriented product supplier with big-name customers in all sectors. We are a single product company, which means we can concentrate on doing one thing well. And, we don’t get sidetracked selling implementation services. Instead, we rely on—and work in tandem with—an experienced network of system integrators. We also train and transfer knowledge to our customers so they can benefit from in-house system integration knowledge.

Scott: What are the main reasons organizations you serve say they need a content management system? What specific problems are they hoping to solve? Give us a few examples (and name drop, if you can – with URLs, where possible)

Robert: The rise in prevalence of eCommerce has had a significant effect on CMS requirements. Clients are looking to make changes to their website content and appearance easier and faster. They are also looking for ways to make their website more engaging for visitors. That said, with the current economic situation, reasons for needing a content management system are continually changing. Customers also want to reduce costs and consolidate several different CMS to one platform to avoid The Content Silo Trap.

We have seen that usability is the key to successful implementations. The large companies we work with look for a ‘simple’ mechanism to be able to update corporate content on their websites simultaneously and are looking for a non-technical process to do this. Enabling this usability for our customers is at the top of e-Spirit’s agenda.

FirstSpirit doesn’t have any vertical limitations and the use of CMS is well-illustrated by considering various sectors:

Retail - Online shopping is the driver. For example our customers, Pentland and Goertz had a growing need for superior online stores and also the ability to optimize their websites to fit channels such mobile devices and print. With this in place they can generate additional revenue, without actually having to invest in bricks-and-mortar stores.
Finance – Commerzbank needed to consolidate their existing IT landscape, be more efficient and save money in the product maintenance and support area.
Manufacturing – Globalization is key. Companies need their websites to have functionality like multi-language translation and comparison support of different country-sides. Content reuse and traceability of changes are also important. Some of our customers in this area include, Linde Group, Bosch, EADS and Airbus.

Scott: As you know I speak at a lot of conference and get to talk to people who are trying to improve their content management life cycle. I want to ask you a few questions that I hear commonly. First, what is web content management and how does it differ from enterprise content management? Vendors have created most of the confusion surrounding these terms (as have a few analysts). So, help us understand how you view these two different types of content management.

Robert: Scott that’s a good question – one which I hear quite often and honestly I struggle to answer it, because there are several thousand CMS-vendors out there, so yes, where is the difference?

FirstSpirit for example, covers almost every aspect of enterprise content management. But our main focus is on a ‘best of breed’ approach, which means our focus is CMS. Other applications, for example, search optimization and web analytics we use from third parties, because why “reinvent the wheel”. We only provide our customers with the best and proven solutions available.

ECM-vendors often claim to provide an end-to-end solution, but struggle sometimes to integrate applications and solutions that they have acquired over years into their main product, leading to myriad potential problems.

Scott: All too often, prospects reach out to a software and services firm and say, “Hey, our competitors have blogs so we need a blog, too” or “We need a web content management system because our department manager says we do.” Of course, these aren’t business reasons for adopting a CMS. Can you provide some advice to would-be shoppers, looking for a content management system to tackle their specific problems? What do they need to communicate to potential CMS vendors in order to find a solution that meets their business needs?

Robert: What CMS prospects should do is make sure their requirements aren’t too large. Often, this is the main problem when beginning to implement CMS. They should try and scale back to core requirements and work from there.

Prospects really should try to document their pain, their goals and describe the three most important things they would like to achive. In addition, they should look for a flexible solution, which can grow with their requirements, and, of course, change over time. Integration of existing infrastructure is also an important criteria, as well as ease-of-use. You can have the most sophisticated solution, but if the users (writers, editors, etc.) won’t accept the solution, the whole project will be put into danger.

One last tip, the prospect should involve all necessary departments (marketing, IT, portal group etc.) right at the beginning of the project through implementation. This saves a lot of time, frustration and money.

Scott: As a commentator on content management approaches and technologies, I often chastise vendors of software vendors for failing to properly set expectations for their customers who are moving to content management. For instance, few vendors actually talk to clients about such things as content modeling, information architecture, standards, etc. Instead, they simply say, “Yeah, our tool CAN do that,” which implies that the software automatically performs these magical tasks out-of-the-box (so-to-speak). What they really mean to say is “Yes, if you make the effort, and learn some new things, you can make our product do that for you. It might take some time and you will probably want to extend your project time line to accommodate these necessary steps.” What questions should CMS shoppers ask of their vendors? And, what “tricks” should they look out for?

Robert: Managing expectations in large projects is a very important thing. When a customer moves into content management we frequently see far too high expectations for the first step. We recommend new customers not to worry too much about content modeling and information architecture standards in the beginning. We have never seen a project fail because of these. Projects fail because after 5 years of working somehow with the growing internet presence, several different CMSes and no working processes, the customer comes to the table with several hundred pages of requirements and the manager expects them to be put in place, while the staff still has their daily work to do. Lowering the expectations for the first step, getting used to the CMS and the new processes, optimize them on the go is the best you can do. If everything works, it’s the right time to think about content modeling and information architecture. A high-end CMS will allow you to do it in that order.

Scott: What is the most common compliment you receive from your existing customers? And, do you have testimonials that you can point would be customers to?

Robert: Main compliments we receive from customers are the following:

Ease of use and navigation
2 clients (Web- and Java-client)
Simple, but intelligent, interface
Speed of implementation
Ability to optimize websites to different channels like mobile devices

Our integration partners comment regularly on how easily FirstSpirit integrates into portals like those of SAP Netweaver, IBM Websphere and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

Scott: Earlier you spoke a little about your product, FirstSpirit, which you refer to as a content integration platform. Can you talk to us a little about what this means? What is a “content integration platform” and why might we need one?

Robert: In the early days, a CMS was a stand-alone solution. There weren’t too many requirements and it was a ‘nice-to-have’. Today companies have grown or acquired diverse IT-landscapes and infrastructures, with existing databases, applications, portals which cannot be replaced at all.

One of the main unique sales propositions of FirstSpirit is the integration of those existing IT-infrastructures that allows customers to reuse content across multiple platforms and output channels.

Scott: There’s been a lot of talk lately about the demise of the newspaper publishing industry. Recently, the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) newspaper announced they would cease publishing daily on newsprint. Instead, they’ll publish periodic printed reports (special issues) and publish the daily paper electronically. This is big news for the journalism industry. Do you see the same trends among your publishing and media clients. Is journalism gradually gravitating to the web and do you believe that other major publishers will also move to a web-only model like CSM have?

Robert: We expect the business models for newspapers to expand. The internet and technologies such as the eBook pose a threat to the newspapers industry. FirstSpirit enables our customers in the media industry to participate in new business models. Every piece of content in the system can be published to different channels. You can generate a website and an eBook at the same time. Europe’s biggest sport news provider sells content fragments to other internet sites. This is fully-automated with FirstSpirit. We have quite a few customers in the media industry. Online-news is becoming more and more popular, allowing a real-time news platform to step forward. One of our customers has more than 100,000 editorial changes per day. Advertisement is a big area as well. Adverts work online more effectively and can be targeted more easily to the audience than in a newspaper. A number of our customers have launched complex, dynamic and content-sensitive advertising though our platform—see examples here and here.

Scott: e-Commerce sites increasingly rely on web content management solutions to power their businesses. Which of your clients are using e- Spirit software to power their online sales efforts and what types of benefits are they seeing since adopting the platform?

Robert: Companies like Pentland (multi-brand owner of Speedo, Lacoste, Kickers, etc.) and Goertz (a online shoe retailer) are using our solution to drive their online power.

Two of the main benefits they receive from FirstSpirit are flexibility and ease-of-use. Results include, up-to-date sites with flexibility for fast changing content, increased customer interest and interaction, web 2.0 functionality, and last but not least, growing revenues.

Scott: Accessibility is a big deal here in the US, although you wouldn’t know it by many of the horrible websites one might stumble upon on any given search of the internet. That said, Section 508, a statutory section in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (found at 29 U.S.C. 794d) requires that US Federal agencies’ electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, have created the need for web content management tools to provide functionality that can help retailers meet accessibility requirements. Online retailers like Target have been caught in the Section 508 trap and were forced to make their website accessible to the blind, for instance. What tools or features do your tools provide to help online retailers and others impacted by accessibility regulations?

Robert: Yes, FirstSpirit supports the accessibility requirements of WCAG. References are: http://www.aktion-mensch.de and http://www.missio.de – Unfortunately, these are German speaking sites only.

Scott: Thanks so much for taking time to help us learn a little about you, your firm, and content management. For our readers who have additional questions or may want to get a quote for your services, how should they contact you? And, do you have any online resources they may find of value?

Robert: Scott, you are welcome. Readers who have additional questions can reach us info@e-spirit.co.uk via or visit our website. Readers will be able to find a number of useful downloads and stacks of information.

If you have further interest, we have a really good and detailed technical whitepaper, which we provide on request.

Last, but by all means not least, we will launch our all new website later this year!