Content Management Systems: why we’re not updating the TechWatch report
Back in September 2001 TechWatch published a report on Content Management Systems, written by Paul Browning and Mike Lowndes. At the time it very quickly became one of the most popular TechWatch reports ever published, and is still a steady favourite, even today.
I can’t take any of the credit for the report as it was published before I took over TechWatch, but one of the first things people asked me for, back in 2004/2005, was an update to the CMS report; particularly the CMS product list. I did think about this, and even went as far as approaching the original authors to see if they were interested in a reunion. However, as I started to think about what the report would cover I had a crisis of remit.
The most important factor for me was what this was no longer a ‘future’ issue. As well as being a very practical report, exploring the nitty gritty of procuring a CMS, Paul and Mike’s report was also conceptual, outlining the bigger issues such as: “In reality a CMS is a concept rather than a product. It is a concept that embraces a set of processes”, and “… the boundaries of the CMS space are blurred. Substantial overlaps exist with document management systems, knowledge management systems, enterprise application integration systems, e-learning systems and portals”. In 2005 these concepts just hadn’t moved on far enough to warrant a new ‘future-facing’ report.
In addition, although there was a lot of demand for an update to the CMS product list, this isn’t within our remit. The purpose of the TechWatch reports is to start the ball rolling and hopefully stimulate interest/uptake elsewhere – we just don’t have the resources for ‘maintenance’.
However, this decision keeps coming back to haunt me, and when I was in Keele for the JISC Innovation Forum 2008 meeting last month, someone, once again, asked why there hadn’t been an update to the TechWatch CMS report. In fact, what this person was really saying was: “I want to procure a CMS but your report’s out of date”, and that’s really quite a different matter.
This got me thinking and revisiting the notes I made in 2005. My conclusion is that the answer is: “things have moved on a lot since then and perhaps you shouldn’t be buying a CMS”. I will elaborate on this in future blog items, but for now, suffice it to say that there is a paradigm shift brewing in institutional ICT provision, of which the institutional CMS is only one part. The future of the CMS is actually caught up in technological reinterpretations of the big concepts that Paul and Mike identified in 2001: processes rather than products, and blurring the boundaries between systems.
E-books: open standards déjà vu.
TechWatch has recently been asked to contribute its thoughts on future technology developments that are likely to have the most significant impact on library and information services in higher education. It’s for Update, the journal of the Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals, and one of the interesting questions they’ve asked us is about developments that we didn’t initially anticipate or whose impact has been greater than might at first have been expected.
This is not actually a straightforward question – just because we don’t publish a report on something doesn’t mean we didn’t anticipate it – but it has prompted quite a bit of discussion. I think one of the things TechWatch may be in danger of missing is the whole e-reader development, which will present challenges in integrating e-books into academic library acquisition, discovery, and delivery systems.
At the moment there are three main devices squaring up for domination of the market: the Sony Reader (from Sony, of course), the iLiad (from iRex) and Kindle (from Amazon). One of the big issues for HE will be the document format standards used by each device.
Work is underway on an open, XML-based standard called EPUB through an organisation called the International Digital Publishing Forum. The other key standard is PDF, which is now an ISO standard. Sony’s reader supports PDF and the company has just announced that they will support EPUB in a forthcoming e-reader. By contrast, Kindle only supports Amazon’s own standards, MobiPocket and AZW. It does not support Adobe’s PDF although it provides an ‘experimental’ converter. The iLiad supports PDF and Mobipocket.
There is more than a hint of déjà vu, here. Last year TechWatch published a report on XML-based office document standards which focused on the arguments around open and proprietary standards and the difficulties that would be created by the imminent approval of a second ISO standard within the office document standards domain. You really need to read the report to get the picture, but my concern is that there may be another ODF/OOXML-type situation emerging, with Amazon taking on the role of Microsoft.
For those who would like to know more about e-readers there was a long piece in the Observer newspaper on the 27th of July, with an abridged version published online. A more technical look at matters relating to e-books, rather than the readers themselves, is provided by the team undertaking JISC’s own major investigation: the National e-books Observatory project. There is also an interesting paper, What Happened to the E-book Revolution?, by Lynn Silipigni Connaway and Heather L. Wicht, which looks at the history of e-books and some of the barriers to their widespread adoption.