Because WCM products manage the content with which your customers interact, those products control your customers' impression of your business. Without a doubt, WCM is a mission-critical technology for any organization that has a significant Web presence.

Many of today's WCM products have similar capabilities for enabling nontechnical business users to control content, but the approaches to this challenge differ dramatically. For example, BroadVision, Documentum and Interwoven are all recognized as major WCM players. However, BroadVision is known more for its e-commerce and personalization capabilities, Documentum for its success in the DM (document management) market, and Interwoven simply as a WCM vendor. The fact that these vendors often show up on shortlists together reveals that people are confused about the differing approaches to WCM.

Vendors that take an e-commerce approach to WCM typically provide the entire platform for a Web site, including e-commerce and transaction capabilities, content management, and personalization. For these vendors, WCM is just one component of the whole solution. DM vendors are adept at managing organizations' information within robust repositories. However, those organizations have to build or integrate with publishing or presentation tools to address the needs of WCM. WCM tools are designed solely for the Web aspect of content management. Although they excel in terms of WCM, they support only one aspect of a complete e-business solution.

To help you make some WCM decisions, we'll discuss the state of the market, provide an overview of the criteria necessary to choose a WCM solution, and review the market positioning and key capabilities of the various types of WCM solutions. In a future issue we'll publish a hands-on, benchmark-based assessment of WCM products, including solutions offered by BroadVision, Documentum, eBusiness Technologies (eBT), Eprise Corp., FileNet Corp., Interwoven, IntraNet Solutions, NCompass Labs, Open Market and Six Open Systems.

WCM Is Mission-Critical

In an ideal Web world, WCM is at the heart of an e-business infrastructure, coordinating the assembly, publication and expiration of content across all business systems. Much like a switchboard operator, the WCM system should be able to piece together content from disparate systems and applications into meaningful documents based on unique requests.

Each system or department would generate the type of content core to its function--graphics, text, pricing data, logos, ad copy, legal disclaimers and so on--without ever needing to worry about how it will be combined with content from other systems into a Web page, product catalog or promotion. The WCM system should be able to manage the content from these systems, assemble it based on the needs of the content recipient and publish the information in whatever format is required.

Because most systems within an organization were in existence long before anyone ever thought of WCM, however, it's not so easy to slip a WCM system into the center of a legacy infrastructure and have the system seamlessly take control of all content. But this is a catch-22 because to support complex and dynamically generated sites, the WCM system needs to be tightly integrated with any back-end system that produces content.

A typical organization starts with one department or process that needs content management and chooses a solution that can meet the requirements specific to the problem. Then the organization expands the solution throughout, integrating it with the necessary systems along the way. DM systems have a long history of being implemented at the department level and then being expanded across the enterprise, making them well suited for this approach. WCM products, on the other hand, are relatively new and have yet to prove they can scale to support an entire enterprise.

Vendors that take the e-commerce approach to WCM are better positioned to be implemented at an enterprise level. They claim their products are designed to integrate with multiple back-end systems to deliver transaction capabilities, order management, personalization and content management. For this reason, these solutions are attractive to organizations that want to roll out WCM on a grand scale as opposed to on a departmental basis. In addition, for most organizations, these systems are too costly and complex to implement within a single department.