“The good news is, nearly all Web CMS vendors are ‘socializing’ the experience around enterprise websites and intranets by adding various engagement features such as blogs, tag clouds, forums, and more to their products,” said CMS Watch founder, Tony Byrne. “Where they tend to come up short is when you want to extend into broader forms of Social Networking and Collaboration.” For that, you’ll likely need additional technologies purpose-built for those services,argued Byrne.

• Profiles and Collaboration are emerging as key Social Software services at a time when most Web CMS products focus on information-oriented Publishing and Discussion facilities.
• Web CMS vendors can relatively easily replicate blog functionality, but many customers still prefer the simplicity of standalone blog tools and services, and not all Web CMS vendors can deal effectively with comment/trackback spam on public-facing blogs.
• Similarly, most Web CMS tools possess sufficient editorial and versioning facilities to enable wiki services. Yet, standalone wiki tools typically perform better at creating new pages, re-organizing and refactoring discussions, and outputting compound wiki entries into printable documents.

• Social Software technology categories range from Platform offerings (from the likes of IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and Google), to Standalone Suites (from Jive, Traction, Awareness, and others), to numerous viable pure-play Blog and Wiki tools, as well as Public Networks (like Facebook) and White-label Community Services (like Ning, Pluck, and Lithium).
• Enterprise customers show increasing interest in extending internal social tools outside the firewall (and vice-versa), but vendors are struggling to support both environments — which have substantially different functional, performance, and security profiles — off the same toolset.
• Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM all actively promote their Social Software products, but each arrived comparatively late on the landscape, and each still relies on heavierweight portal services for key functionality.
• Some vendors offer exceptions to the rule in certain areas. To name a few: wiki vendor Atlassian provides comparatively strong security and access control; hosted community vendor Awareness has good multi-site management; social bookmarking appliance Connectbeam ships with highly functional back-up and restoration services.

CMS Watch, an independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies, released research today at the 2008 AIIM Expo finding that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) web content management vendors are on the rise in North America.

This conclusion stems from the most recent release of The Web CMS Report 2008, in which CMS Watch interviews web content management customers around the globe to evaluate 40 solutions in the marketplace.

“One of the by-products of ‘Web 2.0′ is new attention to public-facing websites — a scenario where hosted Web CMS services tend to excel — as opposed to the more enterprisey Intranet implementations where SaaS suppliers can’t compete as
successfully,” said CMS Watch Research Analyst, Jarrod Gingras.

The two dominant North American SaaS-based Web CMS suppliers, CrownPeak and Clickability, have both obtained venture funding in the past year and recently rolled out new offerings. Meanwhile, significant new SaaS vendors have emerged, such as Marqui and OmniUpdate, targeting higher education and local government customers.

CMS Watch also found:

• At least one supplier is bucking the broader trend: an inaugural SaaS CMS service, Atomz Publish, has largely disappeared in the marketplace after several acquisitions, most recently by Analytics vendor Omniture.
• SaaS-based Web CMS solutions remain less prevalent in Europe. “National boundaries seem to matter more when providing hosted services as opposed to software products,” argues CMS Watch Denmark-based Contributing Analyst, Janus Boye. “The regional and international expansion that we’ve seen among traditional installed CMS vendors in Europe hasn’t been replicated in the SaaS space,” added Boye. Customers increasingly report troubles with contracts to run traditional installed software as a hosted service. “To avoid misunderstandings and conflict, buyers and vendors alike need to recognize that there is more to providing a dedicated service than installing some software remotely,” counseled CMS Watch Founder, Tony Byrne.