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February 2001
E-Commerce Platforms Take Command of Content
by Rich Huff and Joe Fenner
E-commerce is about much more than just taking orders over the Web.
As the ability to support transactions becomes commoditized,
organizations are looking for ways to provide value around the
transaction. For example, businesses are looking to add dynamic,
personalized content to commerce sites in order to provide more value to
customers and partners, and to foster their loyalty.
To build e-commerce applications, large organizations are now turning
to platforms from the likes of Allaire, ATG, BroadVision, Blue Martini,
IBM, Intershop, Interworld, Microsoft, Open Market and Spaceworks. The
question is, just how well do these products handle the content
management needs of the e-commerce applications, and are they viable
substitutes for dedicated Web content management solutions?
In our most recent benchmark of e-commerce platforms we at Doculabs
found varying levels of support for content management. The leaders are
doing a good job of managing catalog content as well as managing related
information that needs to be presented within the framework of
e-commerce. However, the market as a whole has room for improvement in
terms of managing dynamic documents that must support e-commerce
applications - things like contracts, requests for proposals, bills,
invoices, purchase orders, etc.
Managing E-Commerce Content
Managing content within an e-commerce application has some
fundamental differences from managing documents or images. For starters,
there are differences in the kinds of content that must be managed.
Catalog content is the most common type of content that is used in
the shopping and transaction portion of an e-commerce application. All
e-commerce platforms offer a catalog as a core part of their solutions.
Catalogs typically contain information such as item number, item name,
available sizes and colors, item description, etc. In many applications,
there is a need for the catalog to manage (or at least link to) more
substantial content, such as product specification sheets, brochures and
user documentation.
Another type of content is the information that surrounds an
e-commerce transaction. For example, bills, invoices and confirmations
can be generated as part of a transaction and presented to users, but
this content should be maintained in a repository. In addition, complex
documents such as requests for proposals (RFPs) and contracts often
drive the e-commerce process, but in many cases they are still handled
in paper form. Providing value around the transaction means bringing the
management of these documents into the e-commerce application itself.
At the back end, good content management requires capabilities that
are familiar in the document management world: check-in, check-out,
version control, renditioning, searching, etc. In addition, good content
management requires a common logical repository, and the e-commerce
application should be able to pull the right documents and objects and
present them to users based on actions or events encountered in the
transaction. Finally, sophisticated e-commerce demands content
collaboration, remote content creation, content approval workflows and
scheduled publishing.
Comparing E-Commerce Solutions
All the e-commerce platforms evaluated in our benchmark did an
admirable job of managing catalog content. They all provide catalogs
with multiple fields for a given item, ways to group or categorize items
and links to supplemental documents and content related to each
item.
Dynamic content management is much less of a commodity. In this area,
Open Market and BroadVision are the clear leaders, with Blue Martini and
Allaire also providing strong solutions. These companies have taken two
different paths for building their content management strengths: via
acquisition (Open Market and BroadVision), or through building their own
content management capabilities right into their solutions (Blue Martini
and Allaire).
Open Market, Burlington, MA, added its content management
capabilities through its 1999 merger with Future Tense, which offered a
system called Content Centre. With this technology, Open Market's
product can track revisions and versions down to the asset level
(meaning down to individual graphics and paragraphs rather that the
documents that contain them), with good content publishing and
scheduling features. Collaboration also is a strength, as the product
supports remote content creation and editing and flexible workflows and
review processes.
The content management strength at BroadVision, Redwood City, CA,
stems from its 2000 acquisition of Interleaf and its XML-based
BladeRunner content management system. BroadVision's suite now provides
full library services, and it can manage XML content and validate it
against an XML DTD (document type definition). BroadVision's solution
can publish content directly to the Web, and it includes a graphical
workflow component that allows line-of-business personnel to manage
business processes.
The Customer Interaction System (CIS) from Blue Martini, San Mateo,
CA, is focused on branding, and the company has added its own content
management capabilities to address the need to manage and deliver
content in a dynamic, personalized fashion. CIS provides excellent
version control; with the ability to save and version both catalog
content and site content. Content scheduling and publishing is
accomplished through rules-based parameters. The content itself can be
managed at a granular level, with user- and role-based security over
modification and presentment. However, CIS lacks collaboration and
remote content modification capabilities.
Allaire, Boston, offers an e-commerce toolkit that sits on top of the
company's ColdFusion application server. The product provides version
control and the ability to set up publishing workflows and activation
dates. Content can be shared and syndicated across sites or systems in
distributed environments, with publishing controlled at the attribute
level as well as at the object level. For example, a company could
choose to publish content only when the metadata value for the "status"
attribute equals "approved." The product provides an intuitive Web
interface that allows remote creation and publishing of content.
A number of platforms we evaluated rely on integrations with
third-party products to provide content management capabilities. For
example, the e-commerce platforms from ATG, IBM, Interworld, Microsoft
and Spaceworks do not provide content management support out of the box.
Rather, they are integrated with products from companies that specialize
in content management. Interwoven, Vignette, Documentum and Broadvision
are most frequently cited as preferred integration partners.
Enfinity, from Intershop, San Francisco, takes a hybrid approach to
content management. The product offers a catalog with strong content
publishing and scheduling features. Users can create content and add it
directly to the catalog. A Java thin client lets remote users
participate in content creation and modification, with appropriate
security. In addition, Enfinity provides good workflow capabilities,
allowing business users to easily create "pipelines" that dictate the
rules and conditions of a given business process. For more advanced
library services, Enfinity integrates with Team Site, from Interwoven,
Sunnyvale, CA.
Putting It Into Practice
If you're serious about adding content management capabilities to
your Web site but you want to use your e-commerce platform to do it,
consider the platforms offered by Allaire, Broadvision, Intershop and
Open Market. These vendors understand the importance of content
management to e-commerce, and they have made great strides in
incorporating the necessary capabilities into their e-commerce
suites.
If you need sophisticated content management and document management
capabilities beyond the context of your commerce site, realize that
these products are no substitute for systems that specialize in Web
content management and document management. The e-commerce vendors may
never be interested in addressing the specialized needs of Web
publishing applications, let alone the back-end content and process
management needs of line-of-business applications.
For organizations that need back-end content and process management
across a range of applications, the best alternative in the short-term
is to integrate a sophisticated content or document management system
with your e-commerce system. While the major e-commerce players are
getting more serious about addressing content management needs, their
solutions have a ways to go before they can provide an infrastructure
that spans the needs of an organization's many business processes beyond
e-commerce.
Rich Huff is a senior analyst and Joe Fenner is the director of
publications at Doculabs, a research and advisory firm that helps
organizations choose technologies and strategies for e-business. Contact
312-433-7793, info@doculabs.com
or www.doculabs.com.
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