New Gleanster Research on Best Practices in Web Content Management

Gleanster announced the publication of a new Gleansight benchmark report on Web Content Management. Drawing from the experiences of 285 companies, the report offers a comprehensive look at how top performers are using Web Content Management (WCM) to address marketing, operational and sales-related challenges.

The report examines the common characteristics of top performing companies. It looks at how they’re maximizing the value of their investment in web content management, through technology implementation, resource allocation, and business process management, and performance metrics.

Until recently, WCM solutions focused almost entirely on publishing content to the Web. Content types included static text and graphics, audio, video, and simple code to incorporate customized content elements based on end-user profiles. According to Gleanster, WCM’s traditional value proposition has been enabling non-technical personnel ― particularly marketers ― to create, manage, and post content onto websites without relying on help from the IT department.

Over time, WCM solutions evolved as website strategies began to focus on the end-user experience across multiple channels. Today, WCM is growing rapidly with many solution providers announcing sizable growth in their client bases over the past 12 months.

Today’s leading solutions provide functionality that goes far beyond Web content publishing and control. They now include functionality for managing multi-lingual content across multiple sites, aggregating and syndicating content, leveraging social media and user-generated content, analyzing end-user behavior (both on-site and off-site), and publishing content to a wide variety of device types, such as iPads and smartphones.

The benchmark report, which is currently available for free download, is 34 pages and includes data and analysis on implementation reasons, value drivers, challenges, and performance metrics, and also analyzes the web content management vendor landscape. The latter section includes descriptions and analyst commentaries for 38 related solution providers, with comparative rankings across four key dimensions of evaluation: Ease of Deployment, Ease of Use, Features and Functionality, and Overall Value.

As with all Gleanster research, vendor rankings are determined by the experiences of industry practitioners and not by analyst assessment or opinion. The solution providers that received the highest scores across all four dimensions are: Adobe, Agility CMS, Ektron, EpiServer, Kentico, SiteExecutive, SiteCore and Oracle.

Gleanster benchmarks best practices in technology-enabled business initiatives, delivering actionable insights that allow companies to make smart business decisions and match their needs with vendor solutions. The research methodology relies on ongoing survey responses from tens of thousands of industry practitioners. Visit the Gleanster website or read the full press release.