You might have noticed that there’s a new buzzword in town: Digital Experience Composition, also known as DXC. Several niche vendors are getting together around the term, sharing their somewhat similar definitions and also their messaging on how DXC can help you solve your digital problems. Or actually, for some of them only your web problems.
If you follow the wider digital experience industry or like me have worked with CMS for decades, and sometimes try to decipher vendor marketing, you might think that Digital Experience Composition (DXC) is the new big thing. Perhaps even the new trend after headless?
Read moreHeadless CMS has been around for almost a decade and experienced an explosive growth, in particular in recent years. Still, the marketplace is confusing, crowded and it doesn’t require the veteran analyst certification to see that many vendors are struggling to define what they sell.
Yet, to customers selecting the right tool, it’s not only hard to navigate the marketplace, it’s also more important than ever.
In this post, we’ll look at why you might want to consider a headless CMS, share our advice on what you need to make it work, how to select the right one and finally, share a list of headless CMS vendors to inform your shortlist.
Read moreFirst came the Web CMS, then came Headless, and now it’s time for composable
When Sana Remekie talks about the need for marketing to lead the Web or how to navigate the seemingly never ending vendor chaos when building your digital platform, she does so from a strong foundation of understanding how enterprises approach digital and how digital have evolved in the past twenty years.
Sana is the co-founder of Conscia, a Toronto-based enterprise software-as-a-service company that empowers marketers to activate personalized experiences on every channel. They refer to it as connecting the dots with the digital experience graph or to put it another way: Connecting the dots between customer and content in every context.
She’s also recognised as among Canada’s Top 10 Influential Women in Tech and recently became a MACH Ambassador. Sana is our expert of the month.
Read moreHow we build digital solutions has fundamentally changed in the past few years and this also has huge implications for marketing. To just mention a few of the new arrivals impacting marketing, there’s citizen developers, jamstack, no-code tools and then there’s the headless trend enabling faster and more secure websites while also separating content from presentation.
While many IT analysts, vendors, agencies and also quite a few IT departments have jumped on these emerging trends, marketing has been left catching up while looking at an overcrowded and confusing list of MarTech vendors.
Read moreTracking down imagery for campaigns can be quite time-consuming and it’s a real challenge in many organisations with photos, videos and other material spread out across different systems.
In our recent member conference call, London-based digital asset management (DAM) expert Theresa Regli shared her insights on the topic and opened her talk by getting to the core of the problem:
When re-use or re-purposing doesn’t happen, more money gets spend on re-creation.
With a focus on DAM for the last 15 years, Theresa advises marketing leaders and DAM project leads on digital strategy, data design, and MarTech stack product selection. In our call, she shared from her recent work on DAM and integration points, specifically to the MarTech ecosystem.
Read moreHeadless CMS has seen a growing popularity in the past years, mostly driven by developers and customers unsatisfied with their existing digital platforms.
While it is often sold on the premise of many advantages to developers, business users tend to struggle to make the shift to a new paradigm. In a recent CMS Expert session, Petr Palas from Kentico took a look at the most common reasons why headless CMS adoption fails and how to overcome them.
Read moreIt’s been over a decade since Berlin-based industry analyst Tim Walters famously said:
Content is king. Context is everything
While focusing on delivering good content and blazing-fast websites, buyers of content technology like content management systems or digital experience platforms has witnessed a dizzying level of innovation, new start-ups entering the crowded marketplace, and a neverending list of new terms like headless and JAMstack. It’s been quite far from the consolidation and commoditization predicted by analysts.
Some vendors have focused primarily on improving the authoring experience. To be honest, there’s still plenty of room for improvement in terms of getting content into the system. At the same time, many vendors have focused on the delivery part, making your website fast and accessible. Some with a more technical focus, others more from a marketing perspective.
What few have done, is looking at what I would call the middle ground. The actual composition of the experience. Deciding what content goes where, how the different blocks are placed together, reused and ordered. It’s the key to composing the best digital experience and Croatian digital agency Netgen has taken a stab at making it easier with Layouts - an innovative tool.
Read moreMore and more solutions are coming in the headless space. It is great to have more options, but you need to understand the pros and cons of each solution to find the best fit.
Ivo Lukac shares his insights and a few recommendations:
consider your overall strategy, where are you going with your project(s)
analyse what kind of architecture you need and research which products fit (unfortunately there is no better way than to try it yourself or find someone insightful you can trust)
try not to reinvent the wheel
Don’t lose your head
Read moreWhat can we do to ensure that no persona gets left behind in content management, especially as we begin to discuss requirements surrounding digital experience management?
In a recent member conference call, Preston So from Oracle looked to fields as diverse as geology and motivational psychology and expanded our sights to dimensions beyond the static web to forge a new grand compromise between content editors and marketers and their engineering counterparts to foster a bright future for the CMS — and how we can create and contribute to initiatives to support it.
Read moreThe usual trouble when it comes to digital projects tends to be around a slower than expected time-to-market for new projects, an unhealthy appetite for one-ring-to-rule-them-all monolithic vendors, and being locked-in on platforms you no longer or indeed never liked. Sound familiar?
San Francisco-based software firm Contentstack tries to tackle the problems coupled with the increasing demands from customers to deliver digital content experiences by taking a different approach than just going headless.
Read moreTechnology decisions have huge impact and with the seemingly never ending growth in tools to power the digital experience, it has not become easier for buyers to navigate a crowded marketplace.
At SFMOMA, one of the largest museums in the US, they needed an improved ticketing part of their website. Rather than the usual Swiss-army knife approach of “The One CMS To Rule Everything”, they went looking for a new solution where their editors could focus on content, while their developers could keep developing using familiar code.
Read moreI suspect we might be reaching an inflection point in the evolution of content technology. We might be reaching the point where vendors stop pretending that servicing large web properties from a single CMS is a good idea, and instead they begin to embrace and even celebrate the idea of orchestrating content from multiple providers.
Read more