It is 7:30 in the evening, a Friday, and apparently David is busy working on something critical, it must be some marketing campaign, I believe. …ohh…no.…I realize he has been asked to do a thorough analysis on finding the right-fit WCM solution for our new website project.

Well, picking out the right WCM solution for your website is not just about doing some research over the internet. The process is threefold, knowing what you need, identifying what different vendors have to offer and then mapping the vendor capabilities to your requirements.

Step1 – Knowing what you need – This is one of the most significant but perhaps one of the least weighed upon criteria in identifying the solution of your needs. Do you really know what you need? Perhaps you do or maybe you don’t.

This question might be a little tricky as it may have different meanings and value depending upon who this question is directed to. To me, it’s actually a further set of questions which need to be answered at different levels before somebody answers the bigger question on the needs. Some of the common questions can be;

• Are you just looking for a CMS that helps you straighten the possibly out-of-order content publishing process within your organization?
• Is there a need for a system that helps your website integrate well with other existing systems, maybe a CRM, a DAM or an ECM?
• Is there a particular budget bracket, which you’re considering for this initiative? If yes, are you ready to compromise on some functionality and user experience for price points matching your plan?
• Do you have a need of managing multiple sites and catering to multiple channels?
• Are you looking for content management solution for a portal and not a website?
• Is there any inclination towards a particular technology or framework within your organization?
• Do you want to reuse your existing web based content with the new implementation?
• Do you need a CMS/WCM which has capabilities of tracking user behavior, audience targeting and web analytics?

Yet another important aspect to need assessment is about knowing the business drivers for the WCM initiative within your organization. Forrester research in its web content management online survey identified different likely business drivers for any new WCM deployment. They included;

• Improved Web site customer experiences
• Increased sales conversion rates
• Brand consistency
• New eBusiness initiatives
• IT consolidation or cost reduction
• Web operations cost reduction
• Improved employee communication

Your business drivers for this initiative should highly influence your decision for the choosing the WCM product for your organization.

That’s about need assessment. Over here we do not take those requirements into account which would be catered by almost all the standard web content management systems.

Once the needs have been clearly identified, the next thing is about establishing what different solution vendors have got to offer.

Step2 – Identify the offerings – One may get a fair idea about different WCM vendor offerings at a high level from browsing through the different product websites over the internet. Forrester research in its WCM Wave ‘09 weighs different solution vendors based on diverse criteria, and one of those important criterions is any products’ current offering/solution.

Forrester evaluates the product offerings from a content management, product architecture, and additional capabilities viewpoint.

It is very important to evaluate how a particular product handles the content life cycle? How versioning, audit trail and workflows play out? How do administrators manage and configure the system?

Also, knowing the product architecture is very vital. There may be scenarios where the package is very appealing but the architecture doesn’t stand valid with the changing face of technology. A vigilant review of products’ architecture gives good insight into its scalability and extensibility potential.

Additional capabilities like multi site/channel implementations, multivariate & A/B testing for testing content changes on audience segments should again be carefully weighed upon.

Here is a checklist of some of the common features which are available with a typical WCM product.

Other than knowing the feature set, knowing the strategic path a particular product takes is very critical before finalizing on any vendor.

The question is that, how does a customer analyze this factor? From a customer viewpoint, it can be figured out by looking at;

1. The product updates/add-ons any particular vendor has planned or achieved in a given period.
2. The partnerships and associations which the vendor has made in last couple of years.
3. What existing customers have got to say about the product and its capabilities?
4. How many new customers has a vendor acquired in last two quarters?
5. The technology route which the product has taken or is going to take from an architectural viewpoint.
6. If the vendor has grown in terms of its geographical and market presence.

Step3 – Mapping product capabilities to needs – Now this might seem very straight, right? But actually it isn’t. Think about the fact that do you really need everything a good product has to offer, probably not.

To exemplify, there are products which are WCM leaders but recognized for their integration with their existing portal products. Now the question that you should ask yourself is that other than the portal integration, which perhaps is not something you need, has the product got a better value proposition than a mid-range product with much modest price points?

The point here is that perhaps you don’t need everything that’s offered by different product suites. Mapping your requirements to offerings should result in creating a traceability matrix, which should give you a clear picture of what product(s) you should vouch for.

As a concluding remark, I would say, as identifying the right WCM product is not your competency, and thus in all probability there can be mistakes, which might be disastrous from a long term web strategy standpoint. To my mind, the best approach would to engage some WCM consultant even before going ahead with the project in the discovery phase.