Where SharePoint 2007 was lacking a number WCM capabilities, SP2010 WCM starts to look promising. Time get a high level overview of SP2010 WCM capabilities and equate them against the market leader Tridion (according to Gartner and Forester investigate).

WCM Solutions

Although this post will focus on SP2010 and Tridion, it is excellent to know that there is more out there. Take for instance Fatwire, Autonomy Interwoven, Opentext, Day Communique, Vignette, Oracle, IBM, EMC, Ektron, SiteCore, Drupal, EZ and so on.
I am only able to focus on Tridion and SharePoint as I have developed and designed internet facing site for both tools.

Investigate agencies like Gartner and Forrester not only focus on high level capabilities but take into account other aspects as well like strategy, ability to deliver, marketing, consumer reviews and so on. This post will only focus on the high level capabilities.

High Level Capabilities

The following list shows you a number of capability groups. There may be more but I reflect that most of the detailed WCM capabilities will fit into one of those categories:

Detailed capabilities

Now let me zoom in a small bit on the ones I defined above.

â–ºMake pleased management
• Usability (right in line vs. in-context) •E diting (integration with Desktop tools) •Template based •Make pleased review and praise • Exchange Management • Metadata • Library services • Digital asset management (audio, video, images) • Site structure management • Navigation management

â–ºDynamic Contextual Delivery
• Audience targeting • Algorithm based recommendations • Personalization rules • Managing segments • Make pleased filtering (tags, categories, navigation) • Make pleased aggregation (rollup) • Multichannel delivery (mobile, print)

â–ºGlobalization and localization
• Make pleased inheritance (multilingual) • Layout inheritance (multi brand) • Translation services (workflow, 3rd party integration) • Language aware components • Managing translations (resources, marks, taxonomies) • Multi lingual GUI • Global Assets libraries • Scalability across the WAN

â–ºInsights
• Native Web Analytics • 3rd party analytics integration • Track and traceability • Data warehousing

â–ºMake pleased deployment
• Multi site / channel • Multi lingual • Staging / Authoring environments • Make pleased hubs • Replication of make pleased and or features

â–ºIntegration
• Hybrid user profiles • Make pleased feed management outside-in and inside-out • Federation model • Client side APIs • LoB connectivity

â–ºSocial computing
• User generated make pleased (tagging, rating, comments) • Integration with Social Network Providers • Provisioning models (for Community sites, Forums) • Activity feeds

â–ºAccessibility
• Registration •Consent •Certification • Validation • WCAG 2.0 AA+ • Cross browser

The list above is probably not complete but I reflect I have a pretty nice list to start with. So if you are comparing WCM solutions try to keep these things in mind and be honest about it.

SharePoint 2007 WCM weaknesses

So let us be honest about SharePoint 2007. Although I saw a lot of nice internet facing sites, SharePoint 2007 was lacking some capabilities:

• Make pleased targeting: although you may possibly use the Make pleased Query web part or audiences to target make pleased to visitors, it was lacking real contextual, even rules based driven make pleased delivery. Imagine someone registering on your web site, but not having the ability to instantly compile the audiences. Excellent luck with your targeting. Also, people quickly extended the Make pleased Query web part so that it may possibly use at least query string parameters and so on. But still the filtering was limited.
• Web Make pleased management and reuse (try to add a web part as part of your rich text, use folders inside page libraries, treatment of taxonomies)
• Multilingualism (multi lingual GUI, translations API, translatable metadata)
• Make pleased Deployment
• Replication
• Multi farm Synchronization
• Stability (question  you editors to go wild when you make pleased deployment is running, and add some variations on top of that)
• Marketing tools (Analytics, overlays, business rules, organizing make pleased)

SharePoint 2010 WCM strengths

â–ºSocial computing
• Rating, tagging, commenting, integration with Social Network providers

â–ºInsights
• Web Analytics • Developers dashboard

â–ºMake pleased deployment
• Improvements to support massive exports by snapshots • Improved variations by timer job • Side by side page differences • Treatment of make pleased hub for pushing out changes to make pleased types and taxonomies • Managed metadata services for defining taxonomies • Inline editing has improved a lot. Try to add multimedia like videos or images and web parts right inside your rich text field.

â–ºScalability
• Large page libraries now support folders • Consuming service applications

â–ºReliability
• Quality checks: spelling and checks for page assets that are not published

â–º Multi lingual features
• Multi lingual GUI • Translatable taxonomies • Language aware components (take for instance the refinement panel that shows drill down capabilities for multi lingual taxonomies) • Import and export of translations • Translatable columns • Translation services API

What about Tridion?

To my opinion, Tridion is really strong in the area of Blue printing, something I reflect you can mimic with SharePoint but is not reasonably the same. Blueprinting layout is like defining master pages and page layouts that are reused across web sites. You may possibly build for instance the same site in different languages. Blueprinting make pleased is like make pleased deployment and variations where you push out make pleased to different web sites where you can reuse them or start localizing them. Learning localized items, make pleased dependencies etc is more advanced.

Tridion has some integration points with SharePoint in terms of storing assets in SharePoint and publishing them to Tridion.

But the real strong top here is that Tridion is filling in the gap of marketing tools. Where SharePoint has been focusing a lot on the make pleased management aspect. Tridion has some nice features that are really useful for the web marketeers. Take for  instance the overlay feature that add color overlays to your web page so that you can instantly see the most used components on your web page.

So Tridion is better on the delivery, breakdown and optimization of make pleased consumption. The so called Marketing tools capabilities and the Blue Printing.

But on the other side you may possibly add for instance Google Analytics or Yahoo Analytics to your master page (piece of speech) and get some nice consequences as well. Btw. Google Urchin force be an option as well.

Summary

SharePoint 2010 fills in on a number of WCM capabilities when compared to SP2007. The fact that SP2010 has a large developers community out there and it’s extensibility makes it an fascinating choice for prospect internet facing sites. Tridion, when compared to SP2010 is stronger in the area of marketing tools and blueprinting.

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