The CMS Vendor Meme

Well, this is kind-of amusing… Our fellow open sourcerors over at Magnolia have tagged Alfresco among other CMS’s to participate in the “CMS Vendor Meme”.

• A CMS vendor is challenged to honestly answer all items on the “Reality checklist for vendors” suggested by CMSWatch’s Kas Thomas (aka the “we-get-it checklist for vendors”).
• If possible the vendor has supply screenshots, links or other means to make it easy to verify the answers.
• The answers also need to be supplied in a short form of one to three stars (denoting “no”, “sort-of”, “yes”).
• Answering all questions on his blog allows the vendor tag some other WCMS vendors.
• A tagged vendor should provide a link back to the blog that tagged him.

I’m hereby invoking our right to tag: Documentum, Oracle/Stellent and finally our good friends at Acquia/Drupal

Now, In the spirit of goodwill, fun and transparency, I offer you our response…

“WE GET IT” CHECKLIST FOR VENDORS

1. Our software comes with an installer program.

Installers are available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Non-installer distributions also available. Even the WAR distribution generally only requires that the software be unzipped and it’s ready to go.

2. Installing or uninstalling our software does not require a reboot of your machine.

No reboot is required…

3. You can choose your locale and language at install time, and never have to see English again after that.

Users pick their language upon login time, not install time. Language packs are separately downloaded and installed as per our Wiki.

4. Eval versions of the latest edition(s) of our software are always available for download from the company website.

We make both our Labs and Enterprise editions available for download. Registration is required for the Enterprise edition, not for the Labs edition. Nightly builds of the Labs edition are also available.

5. Our WCM software comes with a fully templated “sample web site” and sample workflows, which work out-of-the-box.

A sample “Alfresco” site is included but I’m not personally too happy with it. I have my own demo sites that I use, but I’m not allowed to distribute them since we don’t own the copyright on the templates that I used. Now that Web Studio is coming along, I expect us to be able to offer a fully template-driven sample site very soon.

6. We ship a tutorial.

We certainly do… Documentation is very important to us and we continue to make every effort to improve upon it.

7. You can raise a support issue via a button, link, or menu command in our administrative interface.

Yup, a link is available on the upper right corner of every screen.

8. All help files and documentation for the product are laid down as part of the install.

Help docs are accessible via the Web UI and the remainder of our documentation is available online via our Wiki and Customer site.

[UPDATE: We no longer include the tutorial document as part of the distribution but we do link to the online help on every product screen. Nonetheless, I've knocked down our score to 1 star instead of 2 because of this.]

9. We run our entire company website using the latest version of our own WCM products.

Indeed we do…

10. Our salespeople understand how our products work.

Inasmuch as a non-technical/non-web-development savvy person can, yes. But that’s why we have a stellar team of Solution Engineers ready to lend prospects, customers and community members a helping hand.

11. Our software does what we say it does.

Yup… That’s the whole idea, ain’t it? Download it and see!

12. We don’t charge extra for our SDK.

The SDK is completely open source and free.

13. Our licensing model is simple enough for a 5-year-old to understand.

You tell me, the Labs version is completely free while the Enterprise edition’s pricing is based on a yearly support subscription fee metered by the number of CPUs (aka ’sockets’) on the server(s) you’re installing on. Up to 4 cores are allowed per CPU.

14. We have one price sheet for all customers.

There is indeed only one price-sheet…

15. Our top executives are on Skype, Twitter, or some similar channel, and: Feel free to contact them directly at any time.

Absolutely, the most complete list of Twitter ID’s is on our Wiki.