Find your CMS match

Laura Clemons:

Good afternoon, everyone. I believe that we are going to go ahead and get started. We still have some people logging in, but I want to make best use of our time. Welcome everyone. I'm Laura Clemons, the Director of Strategic Operations at Greystone.Net. After this presentation, we'll be taking questions from attendees. To ask a question, please use the toolbox on the right side of the screen. There'll be a short survey at the end of the webinar and we'd really appreciate your feedback.

Laura Clemons:

I'd like to welcome our presenter today, Michael Kinkaid, Chief Technology Officer at Reason One. Reason One is a full service digital agency serving the healthcare market. Michael has served as the organization CTO since 2018 and has a background that spans many digital disciplines. He has spent 15 years developing solutions on a variety of CMS platforms. He holds BSC in computer science and is a Kentico Kontent MVP.

Laura Clemons:

Now I'd like to turn it over to Michael to begin this afternoon's presentation.

Michael Kinkaid:

Cheers. So, many thanks for joining me today as we explore the wonderful world of content management systems, specifically, how you can find your CMS match for long-term bliss, and how long is long-term? Well, I think at the very least, longer than one iteration of your organization's website. If you bind to a new CMS platform each and every time you launch a new website, then that can be a sign that you're potentially using the wrong approach. And hopefully this discussion today will get you thinking about some of the options that are now out there.

Michael Kinkaid:

The obligatory who am I and why am I chatting with you today? As mentioned, I've been developing for over 20 years, 15 of those years I've been involved in creating digital products and websites that are all backed by CMS. And for the past 11 years I've been working with Reason One, and here is the Reason One team pre-distancing, of course. We're a digital agency based in Charleston, in the US and in Toronto, where I'm currently presenting from, up in Canada. Our team comes from different backgrounds, creative, technical, we have DJs, we've got authors of children's books. I'm a rather amateur singer or songwriter and quite a fun mix of interests, but all united in Reason One's mission, and that is to help those who do good, do even better.

Michael Kinkaid:

Now, what do I mean by this? Making digital products is fun, but creating icons that have a meaningful impact on society is actually what drives us. And when it comes to impact, we're always looking for ways where we can create that, both for our clients and also in the communities where we live and work. We do that through the dedicated time off Reason One gives each team member for volunteering or the donations we make to organizations that reflect our values.

Michael Kinkaid:

We also strongly believe that the web has to be for everyone and it's our responsibility as people in the industry to make that happen. Here you can see the Reason One accessibility team called r1at. This group meets regularly to learn about inclusive best practices on their applications in our everyday work. And finally, it's not enough to simply drive profits. We're changing our policies, our procedures, and our actions to achieve what's known as a triple bottom line. So that's profit, people, and planet. And as of 2020, we are a pending B Corp member organization and hopefully this year that'll come in. We're also, like you, spending way too much time on Zoom calls and many of you are already online 24/7. So again, I really appreciate you taking the time today to connect.

Michael Kinkaid:

So let's get into it. First of all, why should we care about the choice of CMS? Like does it really matter? Aren't there a million of these things out there now? Don't they all fundamentally do the same thing? Well, actually they don't. CMS has been around for so long now that there's several fundamentally different approaches out there, paradigms that will either play well in helping your organization execute on digital strategy or frustrate the life out of your team. So where should we start with exploring these CMS approaches? Well, come with me on a journey through time and space all the way back, at least to the terrible toddler years of the world wide web, as we explore the 20 something years, yes, there will be logos. And if your logo for your particular CMS doesn't show up, then please don't see it as a slight, so I've just picked a few to help tell the story of the 20 years of CMS, is just going to help highlight the approaches.

Michael Kinkaid:

So to highlight some of the factors that have led to there being multiple approaches to CMS, we're going to split our timeline here in 2007. Like anyone can guess what's digitally relevant about this year? That's right, 2007 brought us the very first iPhone and the introduction of smart phones and the tsunami of smart devices that followed really had an impact on where your organization's content could ultimately be presented. Needless to say, this had a knock on effect on how you'd manage that content. Before iPhone, things kicked off with what's now referred to as traditional CMS, platforms you installed on a server. Platforms such as Drupal in 2000, Sitecore in 2001, Epi, which is soon to be called Optimizely, then WordPress, which according to W3Tech, has over 60% of CMS market share. And finally Kentico Enterprise Marketing Suites that recently rebranded to Kentico Xperience.

Michael Kinkaid:

During this period, all of these platforms focused on web content management. There was one channel and that channel was web. As the years went by, they started to introduce more and more functionality such as e-commerce, digital marketing features, and the arms race between these platforms to do everything made content ultimately just one pillar of their services. Now the recent rebranding of Kentico Enterprise Marketing Suite to Kentico Xperience is a hint as to what comes next after 2007, and this is our first modern CMS approach. The digital experience platform or DXP, more than just a rebranding of the term CMS, the DXP stuffs even more functionality into this all in one approach.

Michael Kinkaid:

Things kicked off with Adobe Experience Cloud in 2013. And the focus here is on the X in DXP, it's on experience. It's the end-user or customer's digital experience online and on site, analytics, personalization, marketing technology and machine learning, AI, the DXP is everything and the kitchen sink as long as the kitchen sink is digital. Almost all of these traditional CMS platforms highlighted on the left have now evolved into or are reworking their solutions to present and to be a DXP.

Michael Kinkaid:

So onto our next approach, the iPhone matured and brought us the app store. The internet has also matured. Software was no longer something that ran on your operating system but now he lived in your browser. Software as a service became a thing. Monthly subscriptions that allowed you to access online services. And the same thing happens with CMS. Our next approach is content microservices, also referred to as headless CMS or Content as a Service. Typically cloud hosted like all software as a service, this CMS approach is called content as a service because it focuses exclusively on content. They aren't the all in one like your DXP, if you need e-commerce and marketing, then you're going to have to connect your content microservice to other services and platforms that provide those features.

Michael Kinkaid:

Contentful in 2013 has become a big player in this space. And thanks to their early success, they inspired many more CMS vendors like DatoCMS to embrace this CMS approach and enter the market. The last logo there is Kentico Kontent, arguably one of the most sort of feature rich and enterprise platforms in this category. Kentico software, if you make it are one of the few CMS vendors who and I have a horse in both the DXP and the microservice risk. Kentico Xperience is their DXP and Kentico Kontent is a microservice. Like running fully as a service in the cloud, as they do, and not requiring installation wasn't actually a new idea.

Michael Kinkaid:

Back in the early 2000's, we also had a type of traditional CMS that didn't require installation. These were the DIY site builders, such as Squarespace and Wix. With the rise of smartphones, apps, multiple channels for content, this approach to doing absolutely everything in the browser has kept evolving and a new category is emerging now called low-code or even no-code with DIY site building with little or no-code. And there's a bunch here. Webflow entered the market again in 2013, which seems to be a really popular year for CMS innovation. And you'll be familiar with things like this as well, like hosting companies like GoDaddy are always updating their site builder and a lot of these hosting services will have site builders.

Michael Kinkaid:

Squarespace and Wix have continued and they still very much are in this business as well. So here we are, post 2007, we have our three CMS approaches that we're going to discuss. We have our digital experience platform, the all-in-one monolith, content microservices, the headless API first platforms. And finally, and hopefully I get to retirement before these really take off, the low-code or no-code DIY app and site builders.

Michael Kinkaid:

So let's peek under the hood of each one so you can get a better sense of whether or not the approach might work for your organization, for your digital initiatives. So we'll start off by exploring the digital experience platform. It's definition time. This one comes from Gartner who are an industry analyst who research and evaluates and critique all things digital. So they defined the XP as a well integrated and cohesive set of technologies designed to enable the composition, management, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital experiences across multiple experience customer journeys. Try saying that three times. Basically, very basic, it's a thing that provides a bunch of features to you to put digital experiences together, launch them, analyze them, and optimize them. What word isn't in that definition? That's right, content. It's no longer the focus. It is however as we are about to see still in the box.

Michael Kinkaid:

Sticking with Gartner and their take on what's in a DXP and what should be a DXP, let's see what they put in the DXP box. So, yes, there is content management, actually given DXPs typically come from feature heavy traditional CMS platforms, there's likely some extra goodies in here, like e-commerce and marketing as well. Next presentation, orchestration and delivery. The DXP platform is going to render the interface, render the user interface. It's going to allow editors to compose pages. So DXP is heavily involved in delivery. If we're interested in user and customer experiences with focus, then we need to store a record of those accounts. So DXPs build visitor profiles and store all sorts of demographic and behavioral data.

Michael Kinkaid:

And there's more, we're going to go all the way up here. Customer journey mapping. If we care about the customer experience, then we should have some way to map and design the journey. We're going to need analytics and optimization, experience personalization, personalization being a big driver of these tools, so tagging content so that it becomes part of a personalized experience presented to users based on how they're scored, segmented, profiled. Features such as search and navigation can also be made smart, personalized based on user behavior and interests. There's collaboration and knowledge sharing, security and access control, obviously a very big thing for DXPs. And the big players in the DXP space are already playing around with artificial intelligence, the thing is, personalization, segmentation, marketing automation, it's a lot of work for digital marketing teams to put this stuff together and AI seeks to help out by taking some of that workload off.

Michael Kinkaid:

DXPs provide multiple hosting options so you can host on premise. You can install it in the cloud. The latter certainly influencing DXP licensing, so now it tends to typically be subscription-based. The ability to extend platforms, integrate the platforms, another big focus, multi-experience support. So again, DXPs aren't just trying to provide solutions for your corporate website, but across all of your online channels and onsite as well. And finally, for accessing the data stored on the DXP, APIs, application programming interfaces that allow data to both leave and to come into the DXP.

Michael Kinkaid:

So as you can see here, there's a lot in the box. So let's actually go shopping for a DXP. Okay, so aside from Googling DXP to find some, there are resources out there that you can use to start exploring what's available. One resource often used by CIOs, we just referenced them earlier, is the Gartner Magic Quadrant for digital experience platforms. Here we can see the quadrant for 2021 and the analysis that Gartner did on DXP. So we have leaders, some big names like Adobe, Acquia, Sitecore. Challengers like Salesforce. Visionaries like Bloomreach. Niche players like Kentico. And this is just their opinion. And as we'll see later on, when shopping for a DXP, this shouldn't be the extent of your research.

Michael Kinkaid:

So let's look at one of those leaders, Sitecore, and see how they position their DXP, and hopefully you'll pick up the audio here. And if not, someone can come on off mute and let me know if it doesn't work, I'll just summarize.

Sitecore Voice-Over:

In a world where digital can be the difference between surviving and not, brands needs the flexibility and control to deliver and evolve customer engagements rapidly. Customers today expect personalized experiences that align with their in the moment needs. With Sitecore Experience Platform 10, brands have everything they need to meet these expectations, by swiftly launching and evolving memorable digital experiences. A fully integrated solution, Sitecore XP 10 is the leading platform that creates efficiencies for both marketing and IT, enabling a collaboration that drives success. The introduction of Sitecore containers increases efficiency and solution and team onboarding and enables infrastructure as code deployments. Delivery teams can now easily move to a continuous delivery model.

Sitecore Voice-Over:

Sitecore XP 10's powerful data capability and out of the box connectors empower teams to aggregate customer and content interaction, turning insights to action that drives personalized engagements and results. By deploying on a scalable, secure, and reliable Microsoft cloud, teams can speed time to market and lower total cost of ownership. Front end developers will appreciate how quickly they can build headless and hybrid headless experiences with headless options such as Sitecore Javascript SDK and a new ASP.NET Core SDK. With a next generation editing experience, exciting new options for solutions delivery, and everything marketers need to deploy data informed update, Sitecore XP 10 is the most powerful digital experience platform on the market today.

Michael Kinkaid:

So a few takeaways there. You can see, again, the focus on customer experience. You can see they're promoting that the platform can be put on the cloud. There's a view with the technical background we'll have noticed it's it's based on asp.net technology, and they highlight the changes they're making to their platform to upgrade it to the best and latest version of that technology. So Sitecore, there's a lot in the box. It really is a fully integrated all in one DXP as you can see their list of things here. There's the AI we were just talking about. Out-of-the box machine learning with Sitecore Cortex, drag and drop interface, again for page composition. Marketing automation, campaign creation with reporting on multiple channels that this leader in this field has a lot going on.

Michael Kinkaid:

So next let's look at one of the niche players. This is Kentico Xperience, previously called Kentico Enterprise Marketing Suite. If you look at their stack, you'll see that they also have a lot in the box. They've got similar things here, marketing, content, commerce automation, page builder, again for creating pages using a visual drag and drop interface. The whole host of digital marketing features and also the core customer data features as well and analytics features that are used to par and to optimize the customer experience. So a leader or a niche player, the focus for these DXPs is yet again trying to be on the customer experience and not just the content. So let's look at some pros and cons for the DXP approach. We'll start with the pros. It's by far the broadest range of digital services bundled into one code base, this is what they're going for.

Michael Kinkaid:

All of these parts, content marketing, personalization, work together and were coded in the same framework. You aren't dealing with multiple vendors and different support teams. Another benefit is that these are mature platforms. Remember many of the big players they've been around since the early 2000's and they've been in business a long time and have a proven track record of predicting and keeping up with digital trends. DXPs are focusing on the challenges of providing a unified customer view and experience across all channels and this isn't easy. Digital marketing teams can certainly attest to how painful it is to get a 360 view of prospects, leads, and customers, what they're doing, where they're doing it, and being part of this solution that allows you to present a unified customer experience both online and onsite is really where these platforms want to be.

Michael Kinkaid:

Okay, so let's look at some of the cons. Given how huge these platforms are, they can be complicated to roll out. A lot of them speak about a fast time to market. If you're doing a simple project, then sure you can launch relatively quickly. However, if you invested in one of these enterprise DXPs for all of the bells and whistles, then it's likely going to take you longer to plan and execute a digital strategy of that nature. There's going to be a steep learning curve for your organization in terms of onboarding, training, and becoming effective at using such an extensive platform, and tricky to move on from. Now, hopefully you don't want to, but say you do, these platforms provide a lot and should be integrated to other systems for you to get your return on investment. So ultimately, should you move on, then replacing them can be rather a complex open-heart surgery for your organization.

Michael Kinkaid:

And finally, considering investment, these platforms can get very expensive. Now they are providing a lot, however, the cost of the big players like Adobe, Sitecore, and Epi, means that if your online presence isn't at key cog in revenue generation, for example, a primary point of customer conversion, e-com products, membership, then you might want to find a more cost-effective approach. Likewise, if you end up investing in a DXP to really just manage content of say a single website, then you've likely picked the wrong CMS approach.

Michael Kinkaid:

And speaking of different approaches, let's jump to the second. So the content microservice or Content as a Service, what is content as a service? Kentico Kontent define it as a paradigm shift away from the generic functionality of a traditional CMS focused on outputting webpages towards a flexible integrated set of services that support content operations. So Content as a Service focuses on content more so than the rendering of pages online. Another name for this is a headless CMS, you'll hear, and as defined by Contentful, another player in this market, a headless CMS is any type of content management system where the content repository, so we think of that as the body, is separated or decoupled from the presentation layer, the head, the website, whatever is displaying the content. And again, we have the emphasis on content rather than where it's being presented. Remember our DXP was doing everything, managing the content, rendering the webpages.

Michael Kinkaid:

So what's in the Content as a Service box? We open it up. We really have one core concern and that's content. If we look a little deeper, and we'll start with what typically comes in a headless CMS, what we have is we've got content models, the ability to structure content to make it as reusable as possible and offering an environment for your team, localization, robust APIs so you can get your content out. Web hooks so you can trigger actions in other platforms, we'll look into this a bit later. Software development kits for programming, integration with other services, and environments so that you can have a content development pipeline. So that's headless CMS. The features that take a headless CMS and kind of elevates that to your content as a service platform include custom workflows for content governance, collaboration features such as commenting, suggesting, got content planning with calendars and schedules, task management so you can assign to-dos to your editing marketing team, simultaneous editing, like in Google docs.

Michael Kinkaid:

And there's also some new features that are being added to these services to provide specifically more support for the web channel. And that is adding in things like web preview and page building. So as you can see, a hundred percent of the focus is on content. So how do we then get this content to consumers such as websites? And what if we do need e-commerce or marketing features in our solution? So let's close up the box and look at this service as part of a bigger picture. So first up, get to a website. Our content microservice is a headless CMS, the website, which is a head, is going to access content through the robust API that the platform provides.

Michael Kinkaid:

Now, as the CMS is software as a service and fully on the cloud, this API is highly available and able to satisfy especially heavy workloads. The benefit of content as a service is that practically anything can work with your API and anything that can work with an API can access your content. So we have this site. We could have another website, it could be consuming some of our content. So right away, we have content we use and why stop here? We could be publishing product content, marketing content, e-commerce sites, apps, in-store point of sale, chatbots that can access our content for support requests, voice assistance that could be accessing our content for onsite user queries on our services, digital signage, so our location content can be used for way finding. And as a final example, IOT devices that show things like relevant content to users based on where they are during onsite training. So all of these channels can access content by the API. So our API is channel agnostic. It doesn't care what is consuming the content.

Michael Kinkaid:

And another benefit of the headless approach is that it is technology agnostic. These websites, chatbots, devices, they can be developed in any language. This is a significant benefit over the traditional CMS and even some DXPs. Using this CMS approach, doesn't lock you into any technology. So, this is all sounds great, but again, it's just pushing content. The DXP provides a lot more in terms of functionality like digital marketing, e-commerce, so what do we do?

Michael Kinkaid:

Well, the strategy used in a microservice approach is simple. If you need marketing technology or Martech, you just connect the marketing stack. The microservice approach gives you the flexibility to connect platforms that work for you rather than accepting whatever the DXP throws at you. So if you need e-commerce and you want your product information available to your channels, connect a product information management service, and you can keep going connect your CRM. If you don't like the digital asset management that comes with your content microservice, swap it out and use another digital asset management service. All of these services can communicate using industry standard approaches such as web hooks and APIs, and our Reason One website actually uses this approach. So we have a headless CMS on events on our websites such as subscriptions, push leads into our CRM, an entirely different platform, and sign up new subscribers in our marketing platform. Again, different services, all through APIs and server functions.

Michael Kinkaid:

So let's look at the market. This time, it's not a Magic Quadrant, but instead a grid from G2. G2 is a handy resource for research. It's an online tech marketplace where businesses can discover and review all sorts of technology, not just CMS. And it's driven by real user reviews, so it provides a lot of insight and can be added to the insight that you get from paid analysts. Contentful and Kentico Kontent are big players. Agility CMS and Contentstack also rank really well. We've got Storyblok, which is interesting as it was one of the first to bring back sort of visual page building into a headless CMS. And finally, we've got Strapi, which is a favorite for developers and one of the few here that can support on premise installation. So let's check out some of the marketing from the leader of Contentful.

Michael Kinkaid:

So things coming out of that, align with what we've discussed, the idea of a content hub, of separation of content from code to whoever is presenting your content, but being able to reuse content and publish it to multiple channels. Contentful is a very strong platform and very popular with the developer community. My terms of other content as a service platforms that not only focus on sort of the developer experience, but also that of sort of your key user groups of content strategists, editors, and marketers.

Michael Kinkaid:

Kentico Kontent is one of the strongest, and full disclosure, I am an MVP for this platform, and fuller disclosure, I am an MVP for this platform because I think it's great. And being an MVP is on top of my nine to five. I don't get paid for it. I just think it's a really good platform because it's focused. In terms of why I like it, on top of all the usual sort of headless CMS features, Kentico Kontent also provides features that really make life easier for your content creators. So things that you're going to want, like your content calendar, being able to add in commenting, inline commenting, which you can also do things like suggest edits and accept them.

Michael Kinkaid:

And finally, even though it's fully headless, Kentico Kontent understand that you're likely doing a lot of work for the web channel, and let's be honest, the web is still one of the main channels. So they built out a feature that lets you edit your content in the context of that site, like in other platforms. And what's really cool here is that Kentico Kontent is still fully separated from this site. It isn't rendering the page here, but still fully my code for a separated and decoupled. It just provides an API to load the page to know when it's in edit mode. This type of visual editing experience, obviously it's a no-brainer, it makes life a lot easier for your content team when working with the web channel.

Michael Kinkaid:

So let's finish up. This approach with some pros and cons. Our first pro is that, again, content finally liberated and reusable. You can redesign your website without having to migrate content as it lives in a content hub. It's channel and technology agnostic so, push your content wherever you want and use whatever programming language you're comfortable with. It's properly a software as a service. Yes, some allow for on-premise installation, but the majority are fully in the cloud, they're cloud-native. There's nothing to install. There are no servers to provision for the CMS. There's no CMS to upgrade. There are no upgrades. Another perk is that you can get to combine the services you actually need and intend to use. So it's your DX stack rather than a DX platform where you just get what's in the box or you might get a whole bunch of stuff that you're never going to use and you're paying for it.

Michael Kinkaid:

As for the cons, combining services. So for example, a headless CMS with a headless e-commerce solution does require development for that communication or potentially bringing in an API platform that can help manage the communication between services and MuleSoft is an example of that. And finally, this market isn't as mature as DXP, there's a lot of innovation with headless and content as a service. That means a lot of startups. Certainly established platforms like Contentful, Kentico Kontent, Contentstack, are now fully being used by enterprise and aren't going anywhere.

Michael Kinkaid:

Okay, onto our last CMS approach. This is a quick one because it really serves a very particular type of need and you may have used one of these platforms to create a personal site or a blog, but welcome to the world with like developers or at least the promise of less developments. Low code, no-code is a growing movement for DIY app creation. There's also a wide variety of services targeting DIY website creation, and the goal is do more about the need for development support.

Michael Kinkaid:

So let's review the approach. So this time our CMS box is 100% in the browser. The idea here is do it yourself. You may not have used the services of a digital agency. You haven't called up your favorite developer, hi mom, instead you've logged into some tool. So here we are in the low-code builder, quite fancy in new blog sites. So I click the button that says new blog site and voila, I jump into the template and I start configuring the look and feel, start adding my content. And these DIY builders also provide ways to create business logic as well. So again, through point and click interfaces. When the form submits, I want to send an email, then I want to display a message.

Michael Kinkaid:

As mentioned earlier, Squarespace is one of the leaders in this CMS approach. You can browse to their site and get started by selecting a design that you like. You can add edit content directly in the template, and that can be text, it could be media such as images. You can modify the templates by adding in components. You can also modify site settings and configuration like fonts and aspects of the design as well. And because it's low-code, there are places on the platform where you can add custom code if need be.

Michael Kinkaid:

The low-code, no-code isn't just about websites. Remember since 2007, we've had more channels than the web, and there are low-code, no-code services that allow you to build a wide variety of app like experiences. So take for example here we've got the Zoho Creator, which can be used to build out rapid lines of business applications as well. Airtable, another good example of a tool that allows you to rapidly build out businesses, business apps, sorry with next to no-code. And again, these platforms are places where content can be stored and can be managed. So with Airtable, you can see here, you sort of start off with a spreadsheet on steroids, which you can look at your content in a wide variety of use, such as calendar, gallery, Kanban. And if you're doing web, then they have a page designer extension.

Michael Kinkaid:

So let's look at the pros and cons of this rather quick selection, because again, it may not be the right fit. You're likely not putting your organization's flagship website here, but these tools are great for prototyping and testing a hypothesis before further investment. So before you go investing 200K on a new line of business application, take a week, take two weeks to rapidly build out a prototype on Airtable, test on users, and then see if it's worth pursuing. And that's really another benefit that you can launch ideas fast. And don't tell anyone that I said this, because I do develop, but it's kind of neat and they're getting neater, given it is really early days for this approach, but you can see how AI machine learning, the ubiquitous cloud, and everything that's happening right now is going to accelerate this approach in the short term.

Michael Kinkaid:

In terms of cons, DIY site builders like Squarespace, they do mash up your content with the presentation. So content siloing is going to be an issue, not so much with the app builders like Airtable. Accessibility and performance isn't great, especially for out-of-the-box templates. And if you want your own design, your own look and feel, then you're back to coding. And finally you do get the sense that the machines are taking over. And I have read and watched enough bad sci-fi to know exactly where that ends up.

Michael Kinkaid:

So we have our three options. DXP, microservice, a new low-code or new-code, but how on earth do you decide on an approach? With what factors about your particular organization might you consider to help guide that decision? Well, hopefully no surprises here, given the topic, but when it comes to the first consideration around selecting a content management approach, you're going to want to start with the content itself. It starts with understanding your content structure, what does a CMS need to offer so that you can effectively model your content, the relationships between your content? Do you need to create something that's highly structured? Does it need to be flexible? A bit of both? The XPS and headless platforms are going to provide both options.

Michael Kinkaid:

Low-code platforms like the DIY site builders aren't going to have the same level of flexibility for getting your content out to multiple channels, and this is where we go to content consumers, where's your content going? Just to your website? To many websites? To different channels? And content microservices are API first and channel agnostic, so they're built from the ground up with this in mind. This is going to make them an attractive approach if this is one of your requirements. DXPs are adding headless options to their platforms, but they're exactly that, they're add-ons and part of that model that could be us is going to require management by someone. And again, low-code builders, certainly the site ones are going to struggle here, but the app builders like Airtable do have APIs that you can get your content out.

Michael Kinkaid:

Next, content governance. That refers to rules around publishing. These rules can be like as simple as edit, approved, published. On the other end of the spectrum, you can have more advanced content governance such as that shield on the right and that involves many different steps and decisions, all of which are linked to any number of rules that govern who can do what within the content publishing pipeline. DXPs are very mature workflow engines, so you should have no problem modeling your organizational requirements with the mature platform. Headless CMS platforms will typically provide basic content governance. Mature content as a service platforms like Kentico Kontent can do a more advanced workflow. And with low-code platforms, really it's just going to be the basics.

Michael Kinkaid:

Next area of quick consideration, take a look inside your company, your organization, like what is your current digital landscape? What mix of software platforms, online tools are you currently using? In other words, what's actually on your shopping list? If you're looking for a wide variety of features, content, e-commerce, marketing, and don't have the appetite to deal with multiple platforms, then a DXP is likely your option. Go Content as a Service if you either have already a mix of these platforms in your organization or you want the freedom to pick and choose. And really I'd recommend low-code and no-code platforms for those quick prototypes for internal business apps, one off websites that are very short-lived.

Michael Kinkaid:

Understand your internal skills, both in terms of marketing and development, again the low-code, no-code option, you can go from nothing to standing up something all by yourself in a really short period of time. With content as a service, you're going to need someone to develop the head, the site or app consuming the content. This might be your team if you have internal developers. And if you do have them, then they're free to use any technology. If you don't, then you have more options in finding a partner. You don't have to first filter your options based on a supported or the only supportive type of technology. And as for DXPs, these are huge platforms and entire worlds in and of themselves. It's certainly more typical to collaborate with a strong partner. You can bring platform expertise to your digital initiatives.

Michael Kinkaid:

I wanted to mention security, because there's a lot going on here — PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, PIPEDA, CCPA, really, what is the nature of the type of content that you're looking to manage? Where does it come from? How does it need to be treated? Obviously these concerns are at the organizational level and information security and data policies will very much say what can and can't be done here.

Michael Kinkaid:

But some DXPs like Kentico Xperience have added data protection modules to their platforms to allow for GDPR compliance in the scope of the website. Cloud hosting options related to both DXPs and used by headless platforms are very highly certified and compliant. The customer in this case, really benefiting from the compliancy arms race between the likes of Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google cloud platform. Likewise, low-code and no-code services are also hosted on these providers. Regardless of the approach, your IT and information security team will need to explore any of these considerations.

Michael Kinkaid:

One last consideration, accept any constraints. It's the old iron triangle of time, money, and quality, and you get to pick two. When it comes to your CMS approach, you need to make these considerations, for example, timeline. A full DXP implementation is going to take a while. Regardless of what their marketing might promise, that out of the box demo isn't anything you're going to want to build or launch with.

Michael Kinkaid:

With a headless platform, you can be fast in the separation of the content hub from the UI you'd be building and the API's first approach actually speeds things up. Lode-code, no-code is going to be the quickest, but again, you'll have to deal with the limitations of the platform. As for budget, the leading DXP platforms cost a lot, have complex licensing, and it can get a little frustrating trying to price exactly what the bill will be, 10K a month, 20K a month. You have the software, you have hosting to look after, or you're paying the vendor for a managed cloud offering. You will pay top dollar for Adobe, Sitecore, or Epi, and if you don't have such a big budget, then something like Kentico Xperience is a strong mid-market DXP and it might be a 10K a year.

Michael Kinkaid:

Content as a service solutions typically cost a lot less and range from free to 1 or 2,000 a month for the big players. And the benefit of the software as a service model is that you can start off on a low price plan, potentially a free plan depending on your project, and then move up to the expensive plans when you actually have the need for the features they provide. Low-code platforms are the cheapest of the bunch, but when it comes to DIY site builders, again, you have to accept what you're given.

Michael Kinkaid:

So I don't want to end things on just talking about money, so I wanted to give a little bit of a bonus, and this is, you've settled on a CMS approach, which is great, but now all you have to do is pick one of the 200 platforms that uses this approach. So in terms of how you make that decision, well, you can always engage with a digital consultant such as myself or Reason One, or you can follow the approach that I take when I'm fighting with the snake of indecision. Okay, it doesn't really look like a snake and I was struggling here, so I put a face on it.

Michael Kinkaid:

So where do we start with evaluating platforms? Step one, write down those requirements. We just talked about a whole bunch of them, content, technical, marketing, security, end user, basically go as wide and as deep as you can here, and don't do this in a bubble. Engage with the people in your organization who will inherit this platform. And if you're not part of the decision-making process, but are aware that a selection process is underway, then share your insight. How should this new platform be better? What frustrations do you not want to see repeated? Step two, you've got your requirements, prioritize them and weigh your selection criteria. I typically use a spreadsheet for this. This is the sort of format I do for a sort of platform evaluation, where I list my selection criteria and then I score each platform. So here's our selection criteria for our ideal platform. And here's how I will weigh these with the total being a hundred percent.

Michael Kinkaid:

Step three, build out a list of vendors. Start focusing in on platforms that should be considered. So Google, Gartner, G2, go to these resources, go to your network, looking to others in your industry. Which of your competitors are killing it digitally? What are they using? Add your platforms to the spreadsheet and then step four, we're going to start scoring to see who we can drop from consideration. So we score each criteria for a platform and add a note so we don't forget what led us to giving it that score, because you'll be asked. And then we do that with the next platform, and now, with all of the scores in, we have hopefully narrowed our list down to one or two.

Michael Kinkaid:

The big important stage, stage five. We then engage with the platform vendors directly, get demos, understand licensing and support, get real concrete examples and case studies. Review implementation partners — do any of them specialize in your industry? Are they in your timezone signs? Obviously, self-serving coming from me, but a CMS implementation, you can send us really about any platform. The implementation is only as good as the partner. You can have a great platform, but if it's poorly implemented, then you aren't going to be able to access all of the many benefits that you actually paid for.

Michael Kinkaid:

Finally, get referrals from real customers. This is vital. Some CMS vendors make okay products but are absolutely amazing at marketing and selling. I've worked with clients in the past who were sold the wrong fit for their organization and who invested considerably more than they really needed to, so ask around. Bonus stage, if you can, prototype. I've only come across a few clients who went this far before going all in in a CMS platform and it may require a little investment, but if the digital initiative you're about to undertake is critical to your business, then it's worth it. Don't wait until your first public release to find out if you made the right platform choice. Remember, try before you buy. Don't get sold a lemon unless you're in the market for lemons.

Michael Kinkaid:

So we covered a lot today, what the CMS approaches are, what to consider when selecting an approach, and how to then pick and move forward with a platform. I hope today's discussion has helped out. If you'd like to reach out to us here at Reason One, then here's our contact information. As for questions, I'll answer yours if you answer mine. If you check out the link at bit.ly/ro-survey, you'll find out more regarding a survey that we're currently doing to help us understand hospital and healthcare system intranets. First 100 completes with the email submission, will receive a $5 gift card to Starbucks from us here at Reason One, because after this much information about CMS approaches, you probably need the caffeine, so it'd be great if you could fill that out, but, yeah, thank you very much for listening and I'm certainly happy to take any questions.

Laura Clemons:

Great, thank you so much. So we are opening it up for questions and, again, please submit them to the toolbox on the right side of your screen. We do have a couple of questions and some coming in. The first one is, would you comment on the HIPPA challenges one might encounter for these three types of CMSs?

Michael Kinkaid:

I think ultimately with HIPPA it comes down to the information that you're storing and whether or not that information is even going anywhere near these platforms. With a DXP, you have the option of on premise, so you can install that in environments secured in whatever way mechanism that you need to. So you're going to have more options there with regards to any sort of the information security policies aligned with the storage of that information. You have on-premise options with headless, but with low-code, obviously the options are a lot more limited there, so I think it really does comes down to whether or not that information is actually being stored in these platforms, which ultimately may not be the case. Again, these are more sort of your marketing content.

Laura Clemons:

So you said headless, there is a question, where does the new headless CMS approach fit into the discussion?

Michael Kinkaid:

Yeah, so that was the second approach that we talked about, the content as a service. I think really where it fits into the conversation is when you start to be in a situation where you want that content to survive longer than your one website design, and also for that content to access multiple channels as well, because the traditional way with CMS where the content was so heavily, tightly bound to the design meant that it never really survived when you moved to a new platform.

Michael Kinkaid:

The idea of a content hub is to make that separation, keep your content in one location where you can then push that out and publish it to your website, to an e-commerce site, to any really channel that needs that content. So that's really what has brought about this whole movement. That and also then being cloud sort of native, they are software as a service unlike the, sort of the traditional platforms and most of the DXPs, it's not software that you have to install. And a lot of the DXPs that are on the cloud, it's that code base that someone has then put on the cloud, so I think headless is just a more modern approach.

Laura Clemons:

Okay. What are the differences with, I believe it's as SaaS CMS?

Michael Kinkaid:

So, that really is the software as a service approach and there's a bit of a spectrum here. So on-premise is, I've got the files and I'm going to install them on a server, but installation on a server could also be in the cloud. So, I have it as a platform as a service or infrastructure as a service. Sort of proper software as a service is, it's actually not something that you install. They're not files that you have or that somebody else has. It's not something you have to upgrade. It's all entirely looked after by the vendor. So it's running online and you pay a subscription to be able to access that.

Michael Kinkaid:

But the benefit of it is that it is highly available. It's in the cloud. You don't have to manage it. You don't have to provision a hardware for it. All of that is looked after as part of that monthly subscription, so there's a lot of value there in terms of what you're getting and also what you're not having to do, the sort of the total cost of ownership, you know exactly what it is, it's X dollars a month versus, oh, the server's gone down or the site's gone slow, we have to provision another server, so there is value to that. So it's this weird spectrum of you manage the entire thing, to software as a service where you don't have to manage anything, to some platforms that say they're on the cloud but it's kind of that middle ground where they're just taking the files and put them in the cloud, but there's still probably someone in there who has to manage it.

Laura Clemons:

So do any of these platforms integrate with one another?

Michael Kinkaid:

Yes, and I would say that that should definitely be part of your selection criteria. It's about knowing what to look out for when it comes to integration. So there are industry standard practices and conventions, whenever it comes to integrations, especially with software as a service. So you want platforms that provide robust APIs, look for rest, look for GraphQL. They should provide a feature called web hooks so that in the event that one platform needs to talk to another, it can trigger the other platform.

Michael Kinkaid:

Integration is fundamentally about communication. One service wants to talk to another, and there are now platforms that just manage that, facilitate the communication, platforms like MuleSoft. So I really do think that it has to be something that you could be looking for because there are standards now. When you go and look for a platform, you should expect this. The provider, the vendor should enable these features and functionality that are required for your content platform, to talk to your marketing platform, to talk to your e-commerce platform, because that is where the industry frankly has gone and that's what's required.

Laura Clemons:

Great. I'd like to go ahead and wrap things up. Once again, thank you to everyone for attending this webinar. If you have any questions, please reach out to myself or Michael, and we hope you have a great afternoon, and don't forget to take the survey after this. Thanks.

Michael Kinkaid:

Cheers, folks.