Interesting Discussion on the Future of the CMS
Dries Buytaert, leader of the Drupal Project, has an interesting discussion on his blog about the future of the CMS, which--in a telling rhetorical move--is alternately defined in the discussion as a content, community, and collaboration management system. Indeed, it is all of the above.
The trajectory of my professional career, in many respects, lands me squarely in the middle of CMS technology/implementations, and Drupal is definitely my favorite CMS (e.g.,1, 2, 3). So to say that I'm interested in the discussion is a bit of an understatement, especially since Dries is conceding that Drupal isn't quite there yet (wherever "there" might be).
What I find most interesting is the notion that the CMS is evolving into a web portal that is tightly integrated with the office suite, ala Microsoft's Sharepoint. For those of you who are, at this point, completely lost, Microsoft actually has a passable description of what Dries, et al, are discussing in their explanation of what Sharepoint--this next generation CMS--is and does, and it's fairly descriptive, despite the obvious digressions into market-speak.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.
I haven't used Sharepoint since I was at Washington State University a couple years ago, and then only briefly. The way it was being used back then was as a glorified CVS repository, and, as such, I was largely underwhelmed. It seemed clunky, especially because my desktop at the time was Redhat Linux, and, lacking Internet Explorer, I was unable to take advantage of most of the functionality that my Windows colleagues were "enjoying."
But the notion that I could edit, employ document version control, establish workflow rules, share, and publish documents (both to intranet and the Internet) via my unit's CMS is a powerful one. But as one of the commenters makes apparent, it all depends upon the CMS's reliance upon open standards. The Microsoft marketing quote above promises interoperability, but are they serious? As Windows loses marketshare to OS X and Linux, it's going to be increasingly important for enterprises to implement technolgies that play nice with all platforms.
How might Drupal or other Open Source communities respond? That's the theme from the discussion on Dries' blog in which I'm most interested.