These two types of vendors moved closer together with the WCM vendors adding document management capabilities to their solutions and the others adding WCM to their portfolios, making the functionality they offered very similar. To try and provide differentiators they added further capabilities so that they now provide the functionally rich ECM systems that manage the lifecycle of all types of unstructured information.
There was, however, a group of Web-focused vendors that did not progress down this path, but continued to specialize in offering WCM functionality, hence they came to be regarded as the poor relations of the vendors that had broadened the scope of their products. One advantage of specializing in a narrow area of functionality is that the depth of functionality tends to be greater than that of vendors maintaining large products-sets that cover several product areas. This has now resulted in WCM vendors being regarded as niche players in a sub-category of ECM, but in an area that is also regarded as a product category in its own right.
One of the advantages of implementing an ECM solution is that it promotes the reuse of content, and obviously using the same application for the Internet and Intranet makes it easier to reuse and repurpose the same information. There are a number of vendors that have ECM with a strong WCM capability. These include Hummingbird, which has recently acquired RedDot Solutions, a specialist WCM vendor with a product that incorporates some ECM capabilities. It is available as part of the Hummingbird Enterprise solution or as a stand-alone product. Open Text also has a strong WCM solution, which is part of its Livelink CMS product following the acquisition of Gauss. IBM is another vendor with WCM functionality in its Content Manager product, again following an acquisition. FileNet, EMC Documentum, Vignette, and Interwoven also have WCM functionality.
There are also a number of specialist vendors that have WCM solutions, most of them including some ECM functionality. These include Microsoft, FatWire, and Serena. The disadvantage of implementing an ECM solution over a WCM solution is that the core CMS system has to be purchased, which includes the repository and a lot of the standard features such as document management, and sometimes records management. Meanwhile, WCM is normally an additional module that has to be purchased, whereas with a specialist WCM product, WCM is the main focus, and the CMS features support this.
The type of solution that an organization deploys depends on its requirements, not only at the present time, but also in the future. Implementing a major application is generally not cheap and the decision of which route to take or vendor to select should not be taken lightly. Making the wrong choice can be worse than not implementing a solution at all. Implementing WCM should be seen as an opportunity to improve current processes, and these may extend beyond the limited confines of developing content for the Web into a much broader creation of process-centric solutions to add automation to what were previously highly manual tasks.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
