Here’s the Autonomy Interwoven response to the CMS vendor meme.  I hope you forgive me for being a little late to the game- it’s been a busy week.

Here are the rules:

• A CMS vendor is challenged to honestly answer all items on the “Reality checklist for vendors” suggested by CMS Watch’s Kas Thomas (aka the “we-get-it checklist for vendors”).
• If possible the vendor has to supply screenshots, links or other means to make it easy to verify the answers.
• The answers also need to be supplied in a short form of one to three stars (denoting “no”, “sort-of”, “yes”).
• Answering all questions on his blog allows the vendor tag some other WCMS vendors.
• A tagged vendor should provide a link back to the blog that tagged him.

Before answering the questions, I wanted to gain some additional perspective on the relevance of these items to our customers.  I researched each item by:

• Looking in our feature request database.
• Speaking with our Product Marketing, Product Management, and Sales teams to see if they had any specific customer insights.
• Asking customers directly.  I was on the road meeting customers earlier in the week and I ran some of these items by the customer.

Now, on to the meme.

1. Our software comes with an installer program.

Yes, and we’ve made major improvements to the installation experience over the last few releases.  For example, the TeamSite 6.7.2 installer now installs our SitePublisher authoring interface, which used to require a separate installation in prior versions.

2. Installing or uninstalling our software does not require a reboot of your machine.

A reboot is required on installation and un-installation.  We install an operating system driver that provides a filesystem view into our content repository.

There is a feature request for this item and I’d characterize the interest level as low to moderate.

3. You can choose your locale and language at install time, and never have to see English again after that.

Yes.  We use the current client browser locale to determine the language.  You can easily switch between locales without having to configure anything on the server.

ContentCenter Standard Interface in German

4. Eval versions of the latest edition(s) of our software are always available for download from the company website.

Not at this time.

5. Our WCM software comes with a fully templated “sample web site” and sample workflows, which work out-of-the-box.

We provide a sample site called the “Component Guide” which is a reference example of the 90+ components we deliver out of the box.

Component Guide site

We ship with a handful of sample workflows based on the most common publishing scenarios.  These workflows can be (and often are) deployed “as-is” or further customized with our visual workflow modeler tool.

6. We ship a tutorial.

Absolutely, see above.

7. You can raise a support issue via a button, link, or menu command in our administrative interface.

No.  This sounded like a good idea to me but I wasn’t able to identify any customer demand for it.  I floated the idea by a few customers I met with last week and they didn’t deem it very important.

I did add it to our feature request system so we can continue to monitor customer interest.

8. All help files and documentation for the product are laid down as part of the install.

Help files, yes.  Documentation, no.  The documentation is available for download from our customer support portal.

I wasn’t able to identify any customer requests for us to install documentation at install time.

9. We run our entire company website using the latest version of our own WCM products.

Yes.  We use our WCM platform on http://interwoven.com and multiple internal intranet sites.  Of course we’ll be looking at http://autonomy.com – stay tuned.

10. Our salespeople understand how our products work.

Yes.  We have the most knowledgeable salespeople in the industry- bar none.  I’ve spent 7 of my 9 years at Autonomy Interwoven in technical sales so I have a bit of experience on this topic!

I think some of vendors in the meme need to re-evaluate their position on this item.  Some CMS vendors have seen massive turnover in their sales organization over the last few years, both in Account Executives and Sales Engineers.  Most of the sales teams at Autonomy Interwoven have over 5 years of experience and a few have over 10 years.

That experience buys you more than just being able to click through a demo or deliver a PowerPoint.  What separates our sales teams from the pack is their ability to relate our solutions and value to the unique business pain we uncover at each customer.  That may seem easy, but for those on the customer side you know the difference between a salesperson that understands your business vs. a salesperson that wants you to understand theirs.

11. Our software does what we say it does.

Yes.  I think the best testament to this is our amazing customer list.

12. We don’t charge extra for our SDK.

Nope.

13. Our licensing model is simple enough for a 5-year-old to understand.

Since when do 5 year olds buy enterprise software?  My 5 year old niece is too busy watching Little Einsteins!

Our licensing model is obviously going to be more complex than some of the point WCM vendors given the wide variety of solutions we offer.  That being said, we have a good understanding of the typical configurations we see and for those configurations, the licensing is very straightforward.

I asked a few customers about our licensing and they didn’t seem to think our model was particularly complex.

14. We have one price sheet for all customers.

Yes.

15. Our top executives are on Skype, Twitter, or some similar channel, and: Feel free to contact them directly at any time.

Feel free to contact me at any time.  You’ll find me very active on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.  If I can’t help you directly, I can make a phone call to someone that can.  I’m also very active on FriendFeed where I share lots of interesting content I find related to the CMS space.

You can also find our VP of Product Marketing Seth Rosenblatt on Twitter.  Stay tuned for more names- I’ll add them to the list as I convert them!

I’ll skip the tagging step since everyone I want to hear from has already been tagged.  You know who you are!