hi there good morning good afternoon good evening some of your hard-working folks Ted's we're certainly glad if you're online still at night no problem thanks for joining us everybody dom Nicastro here for this webinar with Magnolia and CMS wire selecting a CMS common mistakes and how to avoid them so we're going to tell you how this webinar is gonna shake out right now we're in the introduction phase going to be super quick we want to get you to the meet on the show that's why you're all here to hear our presenters who you'll hear more about in just a moment so that's only five minutes or so probably less and then the presenters you know 35 to 40 minutes of rock-solid presentation from our presenters that you hear a little bit about in a second another live Q&A that's right at the end we want to hear from you the listeners 10 to 15 minutes or so and guess what you can ask a question now if you want we're not going to pop the question into the webinar right away we're going to save them to the end if you have a burning question right now that you came into the webinar with and it's on your mind go ahead and put it in Q&A module rate at the bottom left there your browser will help you do that and of course you can take advantage of those colorful widgets there at the bottom of your browser they have additional resources including not going to add any technical support you may need so we are your hosts today and that's why our must-have reporter for them you found it in the early 21st century and doing articles doing editorial feed every month we have two of them that's out you can check out our editorial calendar and cover three primary topic areas and course they do custom experience big topic today for this webinar so super excited to have Mike Miller on talk about that and speaking of magnolia magnolia - CMS comm find out more about those guys they're there a platform for building best-of-breed digital experiences you get enterprises such as Avis Generali Tesco New York Times they using these guy in the central hub for their web mobile and px initiatives and check out Magnolia and we're so super pumped to have them on the line with us today and those are our presenters that faces behind the voices that's me moderator at the top dom Nicastro and the real rock stars in the show our co-presenters brian warwick general manager at Magnolia us in his co-presenter a bakhoum our CMS consultants at real SEPs so happy to have this duo on the line and I'm going to turn things over to probably yeah great stuff thanks Tom and hello everyone and so before we get started I just wanted to give you a brief introduction to precept so we've been around since 2004 helping enterprise clients to deliver business critical applications and we work on projects that involve things like content management cloud infrastructure ecommerce software delivery and web operations as well supporting applications in the web space so we have broad content management experience you can see some of our CMS's that we've worked with there that's not an exhaustive list and you know we've mercs on many systems over the years for many clients across many sectors and so an important point is that we're CMS agnostic and certainly CMS Tech Master can our recommendations to clients but we're also very proud to be the leading Magnolia partner in the UK so if you need any more information please look us up or get in touch and we'll share contact details at the end of the presentation and you know Brian great thanks our babe Ryan here from Magnolia we were been around since 1997 so I guess the Elder States people often call but super excited to be here thank you to CMS wire for being our host today and also Ave and the good folks at precept or joining us in delivering the content as Dom alluded to magnolia we're one of the makers or a maker of one of the best CMS is around according to prominent analysts and many happy customers such as New York Times Viking cruises Atlassian American Express the list goes on and on and from our global team we focus on making and supporting a product that's easy to use easy to integrate and develop with and we'd like to be a company that we believe we're a company that's easy to do business with as well I'm pretty confident that our 500 plus clients around the globe would agree with that and that's a new due in large part to our 100% project success rate those that start with Magnolia go live with Magnolia but it's enough about us and like to jump into the rest of our journey today and how you our dear listeners can be the hero of your CMS selection process today we're going to cover some common mistakes that we have seen companies make when selecting a new CMS both precept and Magnolia meet with clients every day you are frustrated with their current platform they feel restrained they feel restricted they feel left out from using other mark tech tools or they feel like they spend more time fixing the system than actually using it a minute ago you may have asked yourself how do you become the hero of choosing your next CMS well avoiding these common mistakes may not exactly get you an awesome uniform and a cape but you will choose a better system for your needs and then should you have extra time you can get back to fighting crime great so one of the first mistakes that we've seen is not making a usability a top priority one of your primary goals is likely to increase your team's efficiency as part of your content operations you want to reduce overall frustration with any of the tools in your mark tech stack and certainly with your CMS as it will be used all day every day so you should make usability a top priority think of your favorite apps on your - on your phone or your tablet there designers have made usability and imperative to grade our adoption increase usage and profitability social media games travel no matter what the purpose is of the app they're all focused on making their solutions as easy to use otherwise we're fickle humans and we'll move on to another app as soon as one is available that meets our needs we may not have the same ability to easily swap out our mark tech solutions although your CMS should help with that as well but you do have the ability to make sure the CMS you select is as easy as possible for the task at hand a clear focus on usability will supercharge the efficiency of your content operations you will create and share content quickly and accurately and a focus on usability will have additional benefits and employee satisfaction possibly retention as well the learning curve for new team team members will be greatly reduced or even eliminated and the quality of your content will increase as a result of simplified tests and cleaner workflows as an example of good usability it should be clear what you can and cannot do with a piece of content menus actions commands all should be relevant to the task at hand and not hidden or overly complex for what you're trying to achieve thanks man so I wanted to talk a bit here about some of the challenges that buyers vary CMS buyers will face when selecting a CMS product but really any software product this could be applied to so that is do you go for an all-in-one solution that meets all of our holistic needs in terms of capabilities but will tie you into a single vendor or do instead go for a set of more distinct products that can be integrated so as I said it's a problem that applies to all software products and it's certainly very relevant when we're comparing products in the CMS space so to give a quick explanation of the kind of two opposing approaches so it's on the left here I've gone what I consider a monolithic solution so one size fits all tightly coupled system so in the CMS sense that means a product from one vendor that attempts to cover as many digital platform features as as is possible so it's called purpose an original purpose probably was to be a content management system so it will be really good at doing things like publishing workflow security templates and and content editing obviously and it will also cover other features that are traditionally not part of the core CMS so that's things like email marketing web analytics and and CRM customer relationship management so as an alternate alternative to this a decoupled kind of Micra services solution is one where you have a set of connected but physically separated applications that will make up a larger overall system so each component has a distinct function it is not necessarily reliant on the functionality of another system so that's what I'm illustrating here on the right these these systems are independent they're built by different vendors as you can see and kind of separate development teams working on them in terms of your internal development teams and then you know they can therefore use they that the system's use different code bases so it could be a Java and.net happen ojs Ruby on Rails prale's whatever whatever you want to choose all connected and making up a bigger solution so in relation to CMS systems this means you might keep your CMS fairly light and then you can integrate with other best-in-class systems to develop an overall solution that is much more powerful than a single product can be so I kind of feel as CMS can be the best CMS but it won't be the best email marketing platform or e-commerce system or provide the best web analytics there they're just out there at the moment there are market leaders in each of these fields with better products and a monolithic solution also doesn't really make sense if you've already invested in various digital systems so if you're wanting to replace those systems it won't always be a sensible choice first okay so integrating the existing systems into your CMS would make much more sense in my opinion perhaps it does make sense to go for a single product with as much functionality as possible if your business lacks any of the digital systems you know perhaps illustrate here that we've spoken about so in that case a single platform could be a quick win to massively improve your digital capabilities but in many other cases you should think carefully before aligning your digital capabilities with a single vendor and the limitations that that might present and the the other thing that I would like to encourage is not getting too concerned about some advanced features so some of the core CMS features are around you know as we've discussed ease of content entry asset management multi-site capabilities intelligent search integration and extensibility how you can develop it and customize the CMS so these are the core capabilities and in my opinion what really matters when considering a CMS product so on the right here is the latest Forrester wave infographic for W CMS and you gotta have a similar list as you're probably aware and all of the products on this list do a really great job and meeting the core capabilities but they're you know there are key differences in the underlying technology the UI the asset about the Box integration the pricing models but the core features a fairly uniform even if they're implemented in subtly different ways some of which you know those subtleties might actually be very important but less important as some of the advanced features so what I've been by that is for example there's been a lot of marketing about personalization over the years and but does your website really need personalization can you direct customers adequately just by using good UX and design which used to be in case but now many organizations are trying to mimic the capabilities of the big online retailers to serve extremely targeted content to individual visitors so if you're building an e-commerce website then merchandising based on the type of visitor you know it's definitely a really powerful tool but if your website is informational he's possible you're over-engineering your solution or potentially overthinking what your user needs where there is a clear case for personalization the requirement has often already been met so most online retailers that we work with at preset these are the people that will mostly benefit in terms of revenue from having this type of feature they've already implemented something using other systems or with proprietary software so dynamically merchandising products is a critical consideration for an online store so these companies have already solved these types of problems and having a CMS that provides this functionalities and a huge concern for them they're much more interested you know in in the core features and also ease of integration with their existing systems so another hot feature in a buzzword is is AI so if you look at software today pretty much all software contains AI and and certainly many CMS systems also as you know are now taking that as a feature so if you have big data millions of records and are looking to find trends within that data then machine learning algorithms are extremely useful but the benefit is less clear in the sea this world most vendors that are talking about this in the CMS context are either possibly over selling what is fundamentally an if statement so if he easily did this last time then serve them this piece of content or are perhaps using machine learning on a set of data that's too small to be particularly useful it's just too small set of data to find a trend you need millions of you know millions of records to be able to do that a kind of exception to this is image recognition which is now in it you know in a few content management systems which it does use machine learning uses AI but it's a separate application unrelated to CMS but which can be used in a CMS context so you can easily hook in google vision for example to tag images that are uploaded into a CMS into the CMS's damn and this is something precepts has actually done for some Magnolias customers but Google vision isn't really a part of the CMS is just an integration that can be developed for any software product so you can place too much importance on unimportant features and the other thing to note is you can also place too much importance on the complexity of certain features so the best example of this is with publishing workflow which you probably aware is the process of controlling who approves content before it gets on the live website so in our experience of precept there's usually no one that has final approval the content editors approve their own changes unless the case we've pretty much all of our clients but in between all pretty much all tenders that we see for CMS having the ability to set up a complicated approval process is a key requirement and most systems colorless capability you know including Magnolia as jbpm if you want to do that but I expects in most cases this is a rarely used feature for most customers so the message here is to think carefully before picking a CMS based on the presence of a particular advanced feature I think your capability to support a CMS extend it if you need to integrate easily with your existing systems and provide a very easy way to edit content online are all you know much more important than the latest Budweiser's puzzlers Brian those are some great points Albie thanks for that chances are our old friend and philosopher Heraclitus did not actually say at first so that maybe is an attribution area of error but he certainly gets the credit for change being the only constant in life a few minutes ago we talked about switching solutions because of greater usability and it's not just usability that drives changing tools how you do business today may not be how you do business tomorrow customer interest buying behaviors and consumption patterns for both information physical goods and even possibly services they're always evolving and mark tech solutions are arriving at a phenomenal pace new features and even new tool segments are arriving almost daily on top of this content delivery methods are always evolving too as an example do you remember when RSS was the next big thing that was going to solve so many content delivery issues raise your hands if you still feel you need it I'm kidding I can't see you but now RSS is just another minor in most cases way to syndicate and deliver content plus we have native apps shows will sharing web apps headless IOT wearables chat BOTS AI and true omni-channel delivery the list continues to evolve and how you deliver content today is guaranteed and change since we've introduced a bit of philosophy here there's something else to consider they say that most significant change occurs slowly almost imperceptibly and then all at once you may be able to keep up for a while with legacy or restrictive CMS solutions but for how long sure understanding where your business and your customers are headed is important equally important is having a flexible solution that allows you to adapt at any pace otherwise you're limiting your ability to do something with all that knowledge that you do have so I wanted to just talk a little bit about the differences here so you're probably familiar with what softwares are services infrastructure as a service and on-premise installations so on-premise means buying and tape maintaining your own servers and systems IAS is renting servers and SAS is renting software without being concerned about the underlying infrastructure some recent is most CMS vendors are offering solutions that meet you know all three of these and I wanted to briefly explain just the differences in these three approaches as it relates to selecting a CMS product so an on-prem solution in a CMS sense that means internal if infrastructure that you is a business support you have complete control and ownership of the physical servers you know on which the or CMS is deployed and you're fully responsible for managing it at all times this means you're responsible for installing updates and patches managing downtime planning disaster recovery and also supporting the CMS products at the application that's you know sits on that infrastructure whereas a CMS running on IAS is similar in terms of the in solution you're fully responsible for the management of a CMS platform but the infrastructure is managed at least to some degree by the cloud provider a key difference is that your costs are ongoing for servers in the cloud rather than a one-off upfront outlay and from a CMS perspective that ongoing cost is wrapped up in the cost Weaver CMS was some CMS providers and yet the other difference is that you can benefit from features of the cloud platform such as auto scaling and robust multi-location failover which are much harder to achieve in an on-premise setup but there isn't much difference to the operation and maintenance of the CMS itself so you know on Prem and IAS from a CMS perspective are very similar the benefit of this approach is that you can sorry finally assess based CMS solution is just software that you can access by web browser so you have no responsibilities in terms of the infrastructure the CMS provider will guarantee the availability of CMS offering and public delivery service and the benefit of this is that you can focus on managing your websites and not on managing your infrastructure and the other great thing about SAS products is they offer the latest version of whatever the software is at the time so the latest CMS version so many people listening in on this might have been through the process of upgrading from one CMS version to another CMS version you now certainly know that I've felt a lot of pain with that over the years with many different CMS products so using a CMS means that this is all taken care of by the vendor the latest features and updates will be automatically pushed out to the CMS instances as and when they're available but the kind of downside is this comes at a cost of making customizations a bit harder so if you want to customize the CMS or build bespoke integrations these things will be more a challenge not impossible but more of a challenge in a and the SAS CMS and you know also perhaps the fault of entrusting all of your web operations to a software company might make a few people and this core nervous you know in my opinion there isn't really a best solution here it's really down to your requirements and I personally really like the idea of SAS but there are definitely limitations here but it can definitely can certainly work for less complicated sites an IAS seems to be a better option than restrictive on-premise solution but I can totally understand the reasoning for some organizations some want to keep things you know entirely in-house so in summary once you've selected your products find a CMS solution that offers you the best flexibility and deliver a model that works for you and be careful about giving up functionality to move to a cloud platform CMS that offers you all the features and functions you need on Prem is probably better than one that is restrictive in some way great thanks thanks I'll be as I'll beim a test here being from the UK where we could be a bit cheeky with this with the title here going deeper than the brochure and what do we really mean by this I think it's a natural tendency to present solutions in the best possible light these are our recommendations then for choosing your next CMS top priority should be testing or trying out the solution that you're considering just the fact that you can try a solution in and of itself should increase your confidence and trust in that solution a trial also allows you to check the usability of the out-of-the-box solution rather than possibly the nifty features that were developed just for the demo another tip is to work with vendors that give you access to education expertise and even team members to help during your evaluation if you're working with a great partner like precept make sure that they also have access to the vendors should they need it be sure to choose a technology stack that fits your needs not just the base technology like java.net or even PHP but also the other technologies in use are they known or open standard solutions or to tools your team can learn the talent exists in your organization or is it ready readily available in the market on a related note regarding in technology how easy is it to upgrade and maintain the solution do you have access to upgrades and if so at what particular cost a zombie just outlined with the various hosting solutions consider your hosting and delivery needs as well there's a solution support public cloud deployments does the vendor offer a SAS or managed cloud solution this is a vendor support installing the solution on your own data center or a cloud provider of your own choosing when it comes to cost be sure to look at the cost of ownership not just the licensing or maintenance fees upfront savings can evaporate very quickly if the CMS requires expensive infrastructure or a lot of hands-on administration another question would be does the CMS support your current and future content delivery needs don't lose your head as we say pure headless may seem attractive now but you can get the same headless delivery and actual content management from many modern CMS's not only does this future-proof your selection but your content editors and business teams are free to create and deliver content for rich experiences lastly check the references you check references when hiring new employees be sure to check those of your CMS vendor as well they are a great source of unbiased feedback how easy was the vendor to work with was a tool easy to implement how quickly was the project life that they have to scale back on requirements to get you love these and many other questions will give you as good a picture of the CMS and it's fit for your organization as your own research one bonus recommendation here as well is ask those references what the CMS doesn't do well and see how honest an answer you actually get oh baby do you have any additional tips to add no I think I've kind of covered many of the tips but I see a lot of questions rolling in so great so we'll jump to those here in a second and I think it would be helpful for you may be left with some some pretty clear and concise takeaways we've touched on a lot of commonalities we've seen together well customer selected new CMS as well as some other ways to dive deeper into what you're actually purchasing so here are some 5 top tips if you will to keep in mind I would go so far as to recommend you print these and put them on your wall keep you from making some of the common mistakes that we covered today by now you should have the feeling that we believe usability is a key priority difficulty using the tool is one of the top reasons for switching to a new CMS even if you're not on the tech side of the selection process you should still insist that the solution is built using known and open standard technology inevitably there will be things to learn but the underlying text shouldn't be one of them do your homework and check out this and put the solution through its paces pick the top three functions or you can use cases you need in a CMS and see how easy they are to achieve the CMS provider should support you witness beyond your top three needs don't forget about tomorrow are you planning to integrate other mark tech tools is personalization on your radar can the CMS evolve with your AI efforts whatever you're envisioning make sure the CMS has the capabilities you need or that they can be integrated easily and lastly choose the solution that is the best fit for you and your business your competitors have different means than you do even in the same industry vertical and the solutions that they choose even if they are rated top in their categories may not be the best solution for you with that here is some additional contact information about myself and our Bane and I believe it's now time for Q&A absolutely guys so I'm the Castro coming back in from CMS where it was Frank Warwick at Magnolia and avec whom our precept thank you guys to that presentation and those tips for selecting CMS it's a huge huge topic area actually because that's in their name but you know when you as a reporter writing articles on this topic I'm telling you if it is still as popular as it was when I started five years ago those are facts so let's get right into it because we have some questions to get into and we still have time obviously so if you want to ask a question go ahead and use that Q&A module it's right at the bottom of your browser at any time just submit a question we're also on Twitter of course - we'd like to keep your questions right here in the webinar platform but okay like the conversation going post webinar or hit us up on Twitter those are our twitter handles there you can also look at that speaker widget so you can learn more about today's presenters in the resources religious to the right for more information so let's jump right in um it's gonna be from both of you and we'll start with Brian from Magnolia on this one you know basically when it all comes down to it you know someone's ready to rock and roll Forrest EMS selection you know what do you recommend what do you recommend your selection process rod how does that play out yeah great question DOM and appreciate whoever posed that question the I guess the top thing that we've seen from from Magnolia on the vendor side is the proof of concept or trial of the CMS we've been able to see clients really hone in on the things that are important to them and understand how how easy the tool can work with them and there leads through that process certainly a list of requirements and RFP all of those things are important but really using the tool for some of your top cases is the the number one thing that we've seen they do you have any thoughts on that as well yes experience is good to kind of think about the technology your technology stack so if you've got a team of Java developers for example and you know you're looking for open source use open source technologies then maybe Magnolias because that's a good fit but you know if you're on dotnet then you know maybe go down that route and you know you look at those products and in terms of like running the process the way that precepts approach is it we usually like to sit down with the content editors because they're ultimately you know the eventual users of the system and the decision might be made by you know the marketing director or IT director depending on an organization but I think it's important to get there the feedbacks going to be provided by the people be using the system day to day so the success or failure of the projects going to really come down to those people so I think it's important to sit down and what we do we reassert is we kind of interview all the content editors Lukie content editors and just get their opinions and their feedback and then we take that and map the requirements to features of CMS products and then factor in the technology stuff as well and then sort of go from there awesome guys thank you for the answer thanks for the question so I'm capturing from CMS while moderating this Q&A session next question mystical Ave for this one so the question from our listeners are many manufacturers claim that their product is SAS they're really a managed service ok can you suggest key questions to ask to determine if it is truly a fast product yeah so so yeah the question is but it's probably really a managed service yeah I mean so software-as-a-service as i mentioned is you kind of it's entirely if you just have a wait go to web browser and then all of your software is there and you know when you need to worry about anything else so so for example if you have you're running a website and suddenly it gets hit by a massive spike in traffic then that stuff should just be taken care of you know by the SAS product so that's a question you can ask how does your platform support spikes in you know in website traffic how does it auto scale and the other thing to ask I think it's probably around the upgrade process and how features are rolled out so you can ask you know how do we is what do we have to do in order to get new features into the platform there that if a pure a proper SAS product you won't have to do anything you're just log in one day and it'll be there whereas you know if you have to go through some sort of process or you know there's your sites offline or anything like that then you know you know that there's something different is occurring in the background there awesome thank you for that a bit and Brian from Magnolia you asked we'll go to youth for this one you know the question is what percentage gray code do you see your customers sitting when it comes to you know on Prem versus IAS or SAS like where do they kind of usually fall from I know your customers that's a great question and I'll certainly answer this particular question but I may answer in a slightly different way what we see is that about 60% of our client base is running in some some cloud environment so the move is definitely away from traditional owned and managed data centers and into cloud environments and then when we look at the various cloud options the from an on-prem perspective we tend to see clients that are running their own cloud as from the vendor perspective as an on-prem installation as well so we the vast majority of our clients about 70% are in the on-prem realm but again within that most of them are running in a cloud provider where they've already cloud enabled their organization they've already got a relationship with one of the cloud providers and it just makes a lot more sense from there the next kind of big bucket is in the eye in the platform or the infrastructure-as-a-service realm and so this we found with our clients offers the greatest amount of flexibility and customization around the product offering because because of the number of integrations and the number of mark tech solutions every customer tends to have a different need or a different tool that they would like to use rather than a SAS type model where if you need marketing automation as an example there's only a certain you know finite set of solutions in that realm or possibly CRM or e-commerce whatever the tools might be so that's typically how we see it breaking out across the client base excellent excellent well thank you for that answer engineer Brian Warwick at Magnolia how big for yourself I'm John de Castro the moderator from CMS wire Brian on this one stick with you the feature so the feature is what features should buyers look for in a new CMS that will help extend the lifetime of the platform you know you don't want something that you're gonna have to turn around and get don't go somewhere else in a couple of years right absolutely spent all this time selecting a tool you want to make sure you can continue to use it well into the future so the features that that we see that are kind of most future-proof for the organization are twofold one on the technology side is using open standards any proprietary software is not going to keep pace with open source in terms of relevancy updates etc so that is a big piece of the puzzle and then the other piece of the puzzle that we see especially just given the pace of change in the the mark tech stack of solutions is the ability for the software to integrate with other tools are there known integration points is code base completely opened such that you can see how other integrations are done you know exactly where to plug in and and to or possibly unplug when you choose a new solution just the ease of interoperating with other tools to me those would be the two top features to look for to help future-proof the platform excellent I sort of have a three except for this one what should I look for in thinking about CMS in a headless yes so I suppose the kind of obvious well maybe obviously because I'm working the industry but is that you need some sort of API hopefully you know a REST API a restful api if eaving that headless element so that a UI whatever that UI might be maybe it's an angular app maybe it's Reax jeaious or where it is can call in to the CMS layer so you're using Magnolia as an example Magnolia has a restful set of API eyes and they're quite extensive color a large amount of the functionality within core CMS and then the other thing is that becomes a challenge because your UI is separated out from the CMS when you're using a CMS is that one of the nice things is when you edit content you can see the page and see what you're editing and that becomes a challenge or more difficult your your front end is using something else so I would look for recommend looking for content management systems that allow you to preview content in in a headless way if you can excellent thank you very much for that the next question was about Google Drive Brian do you want to take that or you know the question was about interfacing if you will drive or external cloud services to create their file it's pretty much about integrations with something like a Google Drive yeah be happy to take that so magley does not have a default or out-of-the-box connection with Google Drive however multiple clients have integrated with Google Drive for the final and a version of content and moving that over into the system there are other solutions out there like contently and others along those lines that clients have integrated with as well one of the reasons so in in terms of percentage that tends to be a little bit of a lower percentage mainly because Magnolia makes it a lot easier to create content so kind of creating content or editing it outside of the solution it tends to be less of a concern for most of our clients but we have seen it with clients that are moving from legacy platforms where it's just too difficult to create the content in the CMS and so they will create it externally and when those clients have those existing tools or their existing processes then it's pretty easy than integrate them into magnoliid and aligned with the content operations and processes that are in place excellent Thank You Bryan sticking with you Bryan Ward and Magnolia this co-presenters have a true mark for your separate listed with Bryan on this one the question is any tips for making requests for proposal processes you know more effective and faster you know should we skip it and go to proof of value instead big questions there as you go about selecting CMS's yeah it's it's a it's a big question I think personally for me and this is definitely answered at a personal level I find ownerís RFPs tend to be a disservice to the company because they they take your true needs and almost make them a bit finite or or to a quality quality qualitative metric driven sorry quantitative metric driven in the selection process so I would definitely lean towards proofer value certainly understanding and having business scenarios written down that match what your needs may be and then going forth improving them in the tool it's similar to you know what the move on the software development side with agile development you know it's it's much faster and easier to to build something if the person who has the need and the developer or is closely aligned as possible and we find that mirroring that process in the selection phase is also good so sitting with the vendor were a partner like precept and saying this is what I'm trying to do can you show me how that's done is a much better proof than trying to distill all of your requirements into a spreadsheet that's going to be scored and at the end you've got a really nice dashboard and score for all the vendors but you're not really any closer to knowing how it's going to fit into your day to day world all right excellent thank you Brian our very next question shortened to the point in your opinion what is the best CMS product okay well since we're doing this webinar with Magnolia I suppose a magnolia magnolia of course but my slightly more helpful answers I think it's well I think firstly the technology is important because you know you need a content management system that your own development teams are going to be able to work with going forward assuming you have your own development team so I think that's Carnival rules out you know many vendors for you as soon as you make that decision but then I kind of think it's subjective I think people it's kind of like how people some people like Android devices and some people like iOS devices and you know these people being both sides of the camps where you know one is better than the other but you know they're not necessarily but you could make a case for for either and it's kind of similar in ICMS space except there's not you know two products there's there's many products so it really comes down to you know the individuals that are using the system and how they like to manage content I mean they're definitely differences in terms of the capabilities of certain features and they should be evaluated but then you'll probably get whittled down to a you know a smaller number of content management systems and then the choice might just be you know based on your own subjective opinion on which is best okay excellent Brian um Brian from Magnolia what is you know what are some of the crucial requirements for cmf selection now we talked about that but what would you say are the differences from now to save versus five years ago I think that will be helpful for some people to know yeah absolutely certainly usability I think has been you know a universal need over the years it's taken greater importance because we're all just so busy and and being able to do what you need to do and we want to the next thing is certainly important beyond that there's the the ability to integrate with other solutions and tools has definitely been on the rise and that's on par with you with the polar for Asian of our tech tools in in in the universe I mean there some needs and cases that are being met almost at an issue level by some really great tools and as organizations you should be able to take advantage of those if they if they meet your needs and help you in your business so the ability to integrate openly we see as as a big differentiator over the last few years and then the last one a bit more on the technical side is is cloud enablement you know it doesn't have to be a cloud solution by the vendor although that's certainly a viable option but you know almost all organizations are moving to the cloud or have moved to the cloud it just makes sense from from an infrastructure management perspective so does the vendor have proper DevOps support you know if containerization and those things are important to you you know there's a vendor help support you along those lines so definitely cloud is one of the top differentiators or differences from the last five years actually thank you very much for that moving along here in the QA of this webinar was Magnolia Ryan from Magnolia and al baiy from forceps Ave the question is you know you mentioned micro services during the webinar in the presentation you know whether it be considered best in breed for us is really a micro service I mean a micro service it might be a function move in a CMS to CMS is a system in its own right but yeah that's certainly the kind of what I was trying to fair which is having individual components that are the best of doing what they're the best of doing s I'm having a CMS is the best that content editing and then using other systems you know the best email marketing platform and best CRM platform and then if you connect all those things you end up with a system that is going to be better than a single product excellent and sticking with you are a this question is about you know having a marketing team that wants to take on a CMS initiation product they don't have a lot of technical support you know so if you have no development team is there a CMS that works best for a team that is purely marketing and has really no development no technical support hey I thought the market isn't supposed to be all technical these days what's going on individual bit answer this question but yeah I mean in terms of not having a development team no we do see that actually at preset with some of our clients and so so first recommendation might be to work with a good partner I mean that's how we work we basically fulfilled a development capability for the length of an engagement and that engagement might be you know ongoing but the other thing is that you know if it's pure marketing the site you could look at a SAS product that might meet your needs for such products by definition shouldn't need much development you know not needing to do upgrades and if you're just using out-of-the-box features don't need to customize too much then you know you're fine we're using the SAS products so that might help Whittle things down to select a particular product sorry I'm sitting on the fence in terms of actually saying products all right cool potentially a question was a great one we will along with Brian from Magnolia what are some typical integration with other digital experience software platforms for the know Leah obviously when you're in a CMS selection process you know you have to consider what you already have in this in the in the market you know arsenal one year we're just selecting to CMS yeah it's a great question so broadly it kind of falls into I'd say three buckets one is around the marketing automation or you know customer conversions fear so getting people into your your orbit and understanding what their needs are and nurturing them and moving them along whatever your process may be whether it's to speak to a salesperson or you know by directly online there so that kind of leads into the second which is tends to be in the e-commerce realm and where we see a good you know kind of overlap there is especially content driven commerce so if you've got a story to tell about your brand about your product about ambassadors for your brand and your product you know that definitely fits well in the CMS most ecommerce systems we find today are really great at the product management pricing checkout process all of those things but don't always present the product in an appealing way which is a good reason to integrate with the CMS and then the last would be a little bit of an overlap with marketing automation sometimes but more the the CRM or possibly even CBP realm so understanding your client base whether they're existing customers or new and starting to mine that data and understand you know do the people fit into specific segments that I can personalize against the work or communicate with in a different way than another segment so typically the integrations tend to fall in those lines if there's a fourth category with most of our clients it tends to be an internal system or database could be reservations in a travel sense or a database of past product purchases things of that nature so almost every one of our clients has an internal integration as well not typically in the mark tech stack but generally a need for a lot of the clients that are out there okay Brian thank you very much Ave is a great question for me personally because I am a user of a CMS and as a reporter for CMS where we and we underwent our own little CM a selection process in few years that and we were lucky enough to be able to use it and test it and play around with it very often early in the process so I was appreciative of that I even though most times I was like I just want to write my article in the current CMS tonight we do this later it was helpful you know so so the question is you know one's a good point you know to bring in the actual users of the CMS the true stakeholder is on the ground people front minds you know that they ultimately going to be the big stakeholders for the CMS yeah yeah it's definitely a good point so the way that we approach it a precept is you know we try and involve them as early as we can in the process I mean as you mentioned that they're definitely the people you know the most important people are going to be the users of the system so you know as I mentioned before the success and failure of the project really depends on those people so I mean if you're doing a proof-of-concept as you know brian has said is a good way to to assess a platform then you know that's those are the people that you want on their right of the star you know giving positive feedback for a CMS before you continue to sort of pursue the relationship sweet I Brian next one for you one of our listeners asked as to us I noticed that Oracle WebCenter was not in the graph comparing CMS features is there reason that would not have as much market presence or is it not comparable to those in the graph that we mentioned earlier in features that's true I'll take a stab at it but it's probably a question best opposed to two Forrester as they removed them I believe from the report this year certainly - - what we see in the marketplace still has some presence but I you could surmise and again I don't have this on authority from Forrester but I guess you could surmise that their feature function set is is not the greatest fit anymore that could be one potential reason that that particular graph does change over time and you know if you were to compare last year to this year there's only a couple of vendors which I'm certainly happy to say Magnolia is one but there's only a couple of vendors that actually improve their position so it could be an overall impression from Forester that that some of the trends that we're seeing are being underserved by some other tools certainly you know as AA bay pointed out earlier most of them have great feature and function set and all of them could likely be a good fit but these terms of Oracle WebCenter debts that would be my guess if you will in terms of why they didn't make the list this year all right thanks for taking that one on Brian the next question and will be the last as we are running short on time here and it will be for Ave the question is a very important one I'm glad we're finishing with this one you got you CMS going but what should you look for in an implementation partner cuz I would imagine it's going to be tough to do this alone so if you do have an implementation partner yeah I think you know part this honest that will tell you you know not only what's great about particularly CMS products you know even if they're affiliated with them and most you know most people you're going to approach are gonna be affiliated with various CMS products in some way but they may need to also be honest and tell you you know where there are potential pain points for you and then they can advise you on how to overcome them and I think the other thing that's important is probably to try and find someone that's a bit independent so unless you've selected a particular product and you know you know you can go for a product then you know then it won't make sense to go for the gold and you know whatever platinum or whatever partner it is for that particular CMS products but you're in a selection process and you want someone there and start helping you through the process then it will make more sense to go for someone that's you know completely independent and has used a number of systems and a partner of a number of different systems excellent lots of questions we thank everybody who asked one and rot the gray answers and the course rate presentation Dom Nicastro from CMS wire wrapping up here this webinar has been recorded a link to the on-demand video will be emailed to you guys in a few business day so look out for that of course thanks to Brian and ahve for speaking and to Magnolias for sponsoring today's event if you're interested in sponsoring a webinar just like this hey just give us an email webinars at CMS wire.com isn't omnicaster o for CMS water signing off thanks for listening guys have a great day