The CMS industry has been up in arms since Janus Boye published a short list of CMS vendors that buyers should always consider yesterday.
The lucky few who made the cut run the gamut from enterprise-level to open-source tools: Day, Drupal, Ektron, EPiServer, Fatwire, Plone, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Typo3 and Umbraco.
All of these CMSes were bestowed with this honor because they met J. Boye's three "must-have" requirements: 1) a focus on content management, 2) a global footprint and 3) a unique offering.
In his post, J. Boye readily admits that the list will likely be quite different in 2010 and explains why a few obvious players (Microsoft, Sharepoint, Oracle, IBM, Autonomy) didn't make the cut. Also noticeably absent from his list were many mid-level players--although that's likely due to the "global footprint" requirement.
While the J. Boye web site will likely be getting a ton of traffic from this post, some industry analysts are criticizing that the folks at J. Boye have undercut their position as a vendor-neutral consultancy by making recommendations for specific tools.
We at Flair tend to agree...it's a bit difficult to to make generalizations about what tools (out of thousands of CMSes on the market these days) should be considered by a CMS buyer, without even hinting at the assumed functionality offered by the tools or determining that buyer's business needs--particularly when there's such a large price range. A better approach for most CMS buyers is to create a list of your top 10 requirements, define a general budget and narrow down the list of choices from there.
Let us know your thoughts on the J. Boye list--or who would be on your shortlist of CMSes. Be sure to include information about whether your list is geared towards a particular industry, type of site or company size (i.e. enterprise, SMB, startup).
Lisa Kirschner
Founder and Managing Director, Flair Interactive Services Inc.
Managing Editor, Content 911 Blog