On Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 8:00 am EST, we launched OrchestraCMS on the salesforce.com AppExchange.
Instead of being 'just another new CMS, OrchestraCMS is a fundamental rethink, grounded in a collective 25 years of developing on and using Web CMS systems.
First a Little Background
We've been a salesforce.com user, partner and, more recently a developer for over 7 years. In fact, our company has been running in what is now called the Cloud for most of that time, so we're both early adopters and long time evangelists of Cloud Computing. Last year, at Dreamforce, we witnessed the launch of a new feature on the Force.com platform called 'Sites'. Effectively, Sites enables salesforce.com users to publish various aspects of their salesforce.com data to their web site. Much confusion has reigned over Sites since its introduction, and we'll help clear some of that up in our next post, but for now, suffice it to say, Sites is miles away from a web content management tool. However, it does provide very important capabilities to enable OrchestraCMS.
STANTIVE got started by joining the pilot program for Sites deciding that our first move would be to migrate our entire website to Sites. Immediately we discovered the need to develop a Web CMS. Our first CMS was crude, ugly, but very functional and our corporate website went live along with the Sites feature itself. When our website hit the salesforce.com Sites Gallery, however, it sparked interest from salesforce.com and we were encouraged to continue developing our CMS, stating that a CMS for Sites was an application they wanted developed by the partner community.
Thus began our quest to rethink CMS. Many readers will have seen a number of posts on this blog with titles beginning 'Rethinking CMS'. We also reflected upon our past experiences, using applications that included Jooma and Drupal (both as users and developers) in addition to revisiting several large commercial CMS projects with our Enterprise customers. The question that was core to our thinking was "If we could start from scratch, leveraging everything we've learned and experienced, and apply the latest development and platform technologies, what would a new Web CMS look like?
Focus, Focus
Our thinking resulted in a mission to solve two key problems:
- Integration - traditional platforms are built on individual system stacks - operating system, hardware, CMS software, web server, database etc. - often the LAMP stack. This results in websites as standalone applications that need to be integrated with corporate applications creating increased cost and complexity. Cloud Computing has introduced the idea of a single, multi-tenant platform with many applications. In this new ecosystem, integration is simpler since applications and users share a common platform and data infrastructure. Leading the way in this realm is Salesforce.com's Force.com platform, arguably the best commercial grade Cloud platform in the market today.
- Power to the Business User - traditional CMS applications, especially those from the Open Source Community, are written by developers for developers. This is a community that tells the traditional user to 'RTFM' as a core support function using mantras like "Ask not what Drupal can do for you but what you can do for Drupal"!. I've never met a user that even 'likes' the likes of Drupal or Joomla, and yet they are among the most popular CMS' today. The website development process remains 99% the same as a traditional CMS, which means we're minimizing the impact on the development of traditional web templates .
The Bottom Line
According to IDC, the CMS market is set to almost triple in the next four years and no clear player dominates today's market. To the credit of the Open Source Community, applications like Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress collectively hold the leading position over much larger commercial vendors. This speaks to the power of innovations brought about by the contributions of thousands of developers. OrchestraCMS is also community driven, as is Salesforce.com. Additionally, the Force.com platform allows customers to 'Crowd Source' innovation by providing the means to easily and securely integrate applications and data on a single robust Cloud Platform that is optimized for business. When a new application is added to a customer's Force.com environment, be it on the platform or integrated with a traditional on-premise application, OrchestraCMS auto-discovers it and allows a business user to present it to the world in minutes, usually without calling the IT department or web developer. We believe this is as it should be. It allows web developers and business users to focus on what they're good at.
If you're a developer, imagine what would happen if you could hand off that finished web masterpiece to a user, who virtually never calls you for support on the task of creating or updating content, and yet is doing so while respecting the integrity of your design. If you're a business user, imagine being able to add, update or modify your content as quickly and simply as using a word processor, with the ability to preview your content exactly as it will appear when it's published. Imagine being able to move backwards and forward in time with a minute by minute view of what your website will look like and watching the impact of content changes with integrated Google Analytics.
In addition, imagine:
- never having to patch your CMS while product updates are provided automatically, three times per year, while you sleep
- not worrying about being hacked, with ISO 27001 security certification and over 100 external security audits conducted on the platform each year, as well as an thorough review of OrchestraCMS code by Salesforce.com prior to publishing on the AppExchange
- having your data replicated around the world every 30 minutes, providing automatic business continuity to your organization
- having a platform ecosystem with over 800 applications, endless customization opportunities and thousands of certified professionals to help you implement those innovations
- continuous platform innovation automatically available to you the day it goes live. Check out Salesforce.com Chatter - social networking for business - coming to OrchestraCMS in Q1
- worldwide caching of your website controlled by you. Your website will be as fast in Boston as it is in Beijing
- workflows and approvals that incorporate not just Web CMS publishing, but all other aspects of your business processes across CMS and your corporate applications
- 99.999% uptime over the past 2 1/2 years and transparent access to platform status
These are just a few of the capabilities that OrchestraCMS delivers, 'out of the box'. Even if you're not a Force.com user, OrchestraCMS runs on the Force.com "Free Edition", allowing you to run your website in a more traditional standalone configuration, while allowing for extensive customizations and integration with the rest of your business applications, if and when you're ready.
We're excited about OrchestraCMS and our entry into a vibrant, innovative and growing market place - Web CMS. Join the revolution by connecting with us in the OrchestraCMS community. We look forward to your ideas, feedback and to working with you. Our mission is to put the power of WebCMS in the hands of the business user, while removing the cost and complexity that so many users experience. After all, business users are the ultimate customer, with the greatest stake in the success of their website. Business users invest in website development and the technologies to host and manage their web content. Shouldn't business users be at the centre of every CMS application?
We'll be launching a new blog to focus exclusively on Web CMS issues and opportunities in the next two weeks. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, we're already planning for our next release in February that will include Social Media for business and many other features that will increase the power and the ease of OrchestraCMS.
Give it a test drive and let us know what you think!
OrchestraCMS. Your business. Your web. In tune.TM
