When a new release comes out, everyone wants to hear about what it does. Well, you can go read the Percussion CM1 Version 2 announcement for that. I'm here today to give you the real news about Percussion CM1 Version 2. It's much bigger, and it's coming to ALL the Percussion WCM products. Percussion is finally, at long last, and unlike any other vendor or open source community, offering an enterprise class WCM that is a Product.

Confused? Let me explain.

First, go ask your WCM administrator whether your system does something. Anything. It doesn't have to be leading edge like "does our WCM do HTML 5 yet?" you could try "does it make sure we always have ALT text on images?" or how about "does it require an approval before my change goes live?" Ask about any real world business need you have and the answer you will get from the WCM owner is always some variation of "well, it can be made to do that if you want it to." The same answer will come out of any panel of gurus, analysts, CTOs and WCM consultants.

In the WCM market, everyone is channeling the Pink Panther's Inspector Clouseau, "I suspect everyone and no one!" All these WCM "products" do everything and nothing. The reason is simple, none of these enterprise strength WCM "products" are actually "products." Instead, they are general purpose WCM platforms on which YOU the customer (or your consultants) builds your WCM application, often called your "implementation." Trouble is, for real world people, the implementation IS the WCM. You only hear about it after something goes wrong:

• Don't like that edit form? We built in too many fields in our implementation. 
• Alt text not being enforced? We forgot to turn on validation in our implementation. 
• Upgrade didn't work? The software upgraded fine, it's just the code in our implementation that didn't survive. 
• Can we do the iPad, HTML5, or anything new ever? Sure, but we just need to add support for that in our implementation.

Every one of these changes to the implementation requires huge cost, time and effort. But as the Web is so elusive, it's often hard to justify this expense. By the time you are done, the web will have moved on to the next thing. Can't we just manually check our Alt text? Is the iPad really worth the development time? Is there a new device, standard, channel (whatever) coming out soon anyway? In short, we give up. We live with it as is and just hope the WCM doesn't get in the way. Our collective dependence on "the implementation" is not simply the proverbial elephant in the room, it's an angry elephant charging through a tiny packed room of screaming helpless marketers with no where else to go.

Somehow the WCM industry - analysts and consultants, open source communities, vendors - have all managed to accept or promote the concept that in order to build your own unique custom Web presence, you ALSO need to build your own unique custom WCM application. It's not about "buy vs. build" with this crowd, but "buy then build."

Percussion is done with the "buy then build" concept of WCM.  The WCM application should not be an "implementation" of a product. For Percussion, the WCM application IS THE PRODUCT. And this is not just for some low-end, limited, entry level WCM customer either. Enterprise strength, high scale deployments and best-of-the-best web sites need a WCM Product too! No matter who you are, Percussion believes you should be building differentiation online, custom sites, web applications, and web experiences, NOT building your own custom WCM application for your authors and editors, leave that part to us. 

And that's where Percussion CM1 Version 2 comes in. Percussion CM1 has always been "WCM that's a product." There is no implementation. Sure you get to build your own custom sites and templates and pages - but the WCM application is defined by what you buy, by standard interchangeable Widgets and Gadgets that you drag and drop in combination to make your own custom sites and pages.

The concept was so revolutionary, that we soft launched it a year ago as simply an "out of box" WCM for entry level buyers without development resources. No more. Percussion CM1 has officially come of age with the latest version, and it's only growing as the 2.x releases drop adding more scale, more widgets more of everything that enterprise class customers need. In Percussion CM1 Version 2, the Widget and Gadget library has been expanded to social media, we've added the latest Semantic Web capabilities for dynamic tagging and categorization, and much much more. More importantly, Percussion CM1 Version 2 is the trail head for where Percussion is taking ALL of our WCM offerings. Everything is going Product, it's only a matter of time and how you get there.

Having said all that, we're not sticklers. If you really must implement your own custom WCM, the room with the stampeding elephant is still available - but you're going to have to let yourself in.

Forrester Research finds itself in a bit of a firestorm these days over it's recent decision to require all of its analysts to blog on "research related topics" only through the Forrester blog site. So far, much of the debate over the policy has centered on the issue of balancing the benefits of "personal brands" with the need for "content based" companies to charge for corporate branded content. Forrester makes an ironic case for the policy, by drawing analogies to the New York Times and CBS of all things. Isn't the main stream media a case study in how NOT to charge for access to content?

Forrester Research faces a deeper problem than blog policy here. It's a problem that makes me think back to days when I first met my wife. At the time she was very active in helping to organize the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers. They faced a challenge. How could an institution so well renowned and seemingly enlightened as Harvard possibly need a union? They came up with a brilliant campaign slogan: "we can't eat prestige." The message was clear; we're not in awe of the brand because we work here, we live with the results of what you do every day.

That was all back in 1994. Now the information economy has become the full blown conversation economy, giving all of us unlimited access to information and people. Each of us can now validate claims, read reviews, and "live the actual results every day." Through social media "we all work there" now. Any industry based on analysis, prestige, and expert advice needs to re-examine their value, using new media as a guide. Expertise has been replaced by access to raw details, ability to navigate the volume of information, aggregate it and make it all relevant, and then connect consumers with their peers.

Today, when my wife and I want advice on whether our twin 9-year-olds can watch a movie, we no longer look up whether some "expert" move critic thinks it was "good family" fare. I can now look up the exact facts about the language, violence and other aspects so I can decide for myself. In finance, I can connect directly with "like minded fools." When buying a car, I can see what the enthusiasts have to say. Above all, I can find all the data I could possibly want at my fingertips.

The transition from charging for "expert opinion" to hard facts is not easy. It's a particularly hard lesson for those who have put as much time into their "prestige" brand as Forrester. On the other hand, there's only so many times you can ask customers to order up a plate of prestige before they realize they're still hungry.