Why did Alfresco score so badly in the CMS Watch report?

dozyarmadillo — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 07:36:02 GMT

I haven't seen the actual report (costs money) but the CMS Watch annual kudos scores Alfresco badly - http://blogs.onenw.org/jon/archives/2007/06/16/plone-blows-away-commercial-and-open-source-competition-in-cmswatch-review/.Has anyone seen the CMS report? If so, can you summarise the issues that CM

Re: Why did Alfresco score so badly in the CMS Watch report?

kvc — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 14:11:16 GMT

Mark:

Actually, I would not refer to this person's rankings, for a few reasons:

1. We did very well in the CMSWatch review. I would encourage anyone to buy it and read it. If you are embarking on a CMS project, I'd is a seminal resource. It very well captures the architecture of our product, how it can be used, and its advantages. Of course we don't agree with everything in the report (and probably never will), but on the whole I think very neatly captures our capabilities. Please do read; these ratings aside, it paints a very positive picture.

2. His summarization isn't based on the report. The CMSWatch report does provide summary stats for each vendor, giving them rankings from a plus to a minus on a variety of categories. If you provide a normal weighting (2, 1, 0, -1, -2) against each of these, and compare Alfresco to other CMS, once again, we do very well.

This person's summarization is based on the publically available "kudos,   honorable mentions, etc." recently released by CMSWatch. In this released information, we were noted as lagging in:

* Good value (we charge $$$ for enterprise support)
* Maintenance and support (suppose related to the above)
* Personalization (we don't have an explicit personalization features
    baked in out-of-the-box; that is custom logic you build yourself
    in your presentation layer)
* Templating (we support XMLSchema, Freemarker, XSLT, and XSLFO -
    and require a developer use standard tools to create these - we get
    dinged for lack of built-in design tools)
* Page Rendering (not quite sure why dinged here; think they got the
    impression we only supported parbaking of web pages. We support
    both parbaking and dynamic delivery. Best to read the report here)

At least two of these are subjective vendor review not based on product itself. At least one (personalization) is an area where we explicitly chose not to build product. At least one (templating) was also an explicit choice to let developers use any existing schema or template or continue to use whatever tool they want to use to build templates. And one, well, have to admit one I don't understand.

What's more interesting though is how this person even using this information came up with his rankings. Alfresco has 10 Laggging? Take a look at CMSWatch itself. We don't have 10 laggings - we have the above 5 and the above 5 only. I can't fathom where the additional 5 come from:

http://www.cmswatch.com/Feature/164-WCM-Marketplace?source=RSS

3. CMSWatch report wasn't meant to be used this way. CMSWatch report provides detailed product analysis so that you can match the best product to your business requirements. Summary stats are not intended to be used as a selection criteria. This is why I encourage everyone to read the report. Since it (well, very nearly) captures the capabilities of our product, you'll be able to readily assess (if you chose not to download and eval yourself) whether or not we're a good fit. And the report also highlights the major differences between an Alfresco and Plone - it's less about features than the types of environments they are designed for.

We were actually really very happy with the CMSWatch report (if you can't tell by my shameless plugs). This summarization - which I don't understand at all, especially the phantom counting of 5 additional Alfresco laggings - seems like it has another agenda, which is to promote Plone (and maybe dump on us in the process).

I am going to ask this person to explain the data discrepancy. But like I said, if you're going to use summary stats, use the actual stas in the report itself, or, better yet, read the report thoroughly and get a good handle on our system.

Thanks btw for raising this to this forum. I think his analysis is deeply flawed.

Kevin

Re: Why did Alfresco score so badly in the CMS Watch report?

dozyarmadillo — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 18:34:55 GMT

Thanks for the thorough explanation Kevin. I will attempt (again) to get my work to purchase the report.

Re: Why did Alfresco score so badly in the CMS Watch report?

kvc — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 23:27:57 GMT

As a quick follow-up, the folks at CMS Watch did post a response to the original blog posting:

http://blogs.onenw.org/jon/archives/2007/06/16/plone-blows-away-commercial-and-open-source-competition-in-cmswatch-review/

Kevin

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Why did Alfresco score so badly in the CMS Watch report?

Re: Why did Alfresco score so badly in the CMS Watch report?

Re: Why did Alfresco score so badly in the CMS Watch report?

Re: Why did Alfresco score so badly in the CMS Watch report?