When the website was a less transactional channel, banks had less site--and fewer functions--to manage. As they grew into workhorses of corporate operations, websites gained the complexity of moving parts, and took on such specialty roles as customer service channel, intranet gateway, and e-business venue.

Now, everyone that manages your site, or lands there, has certain expectations and wants snap results--without static. It's little wonder, then, that automation supplied by content management systems is coming to seem a must, almost a decade past their introduction.

At very least, the "CM" toolset has become a "must think about carefully" item in the quest to generate a website worthy of buzz.

Forrester recently surveyed 55 IT decision makers in large corporations, finding that a third of the group were dissatisfied with their current website deployments. Poor usability for content contributors was identified as the primary reason. A quick search online will turn up numerous blog comments on the "difficulty of content management," or "why content management projects tend to fail."

Why do they? "Many organizations are just getting started with content management systems--many users are struggling through their first projects," says Tony Byrne, founder and editor of CMS Watch, a newsletter that reports on content management trends and technologies.

Meanwhile, the field is beyond crowded, with about 2,000 vendors featuring products in this area, so it makes sense that the RFP process is fraught with angst. There are content managment systems that focus broadly on the enterprise, and others that are aimed only at the internet.

As it turns out, there are more details around what needs to be done to create a great website than you'd think. According to a white paper on the subject authored by Step Two Designs, Sydney, Australia, key requirements might include an integrated authoring environment, the ability to separate content from presentation (in order to publish in multiple formats), multi-user authoring, and content re-using.

A step beyond HTML

Prior to a few years ago, the technology used to be tricky to work with and required non-technical users to master HTML, notes Rolf Kraus, director of business development, Sitecore, San Rafael, Calif. Then a new wave of competitors entered the fray. "Our technology is built on the .NET platform and uses XML, a page description language, and XXLTs, which style the page," he explains.

"Our content is separate from the presentation layer, so non-technical people can work with the application the way they would work with a Word document," he explains. The only difference is that users have to fill out a few additional fields of information.

"Then the rendering engine places the document up on a page in accordance with style-sheet designations," Kraus says. While this aspect of web work has been simplified, Kraus doesn't try to kid anybody that working with content management is entirely easy. "What's challenging about these projects is getting everyone in agreement over what type of new system to use and getting system requirements hammered out preinstallation," Kraus explains.

The loan department, for example, would need different content than the wealth management division. The schedule of content update, the workflow, the number of users that need to interact with a given document, all of these will affect requirements.

Keeping it simple--yet useful

CM is becoming more of an issue as businesses grapple with IT simplification and control on the one hand and adding capability on the other, writes Forrester analyst Kyle McNabb, who reviewed vendors that include ECM/Documentum, FatWire, and Interwoven as well as Percussion Software, Stellent, Tridion, and Vignette.

In early April, when ABABJ contacted McNabb, he was attending Forrester's IT Forum, where content management systems were a topic of interest. That same week, Gartner hosted its Portals, Content, and Collaboration Summit, leaving little doubt that this "oldish yet new" area was generating some heat in the marketplace.

Fatwire Software was mentioned in Forrester's report as a leader in the content-centric method. It focuses on how content impacts sales, offering strong web management, reporting, and analytics to support that effort.

"The idea is to help banks realize what capabilities their customers are using and to guide them through channel upgrades and capability overhauls," says Jeff Ernst, vice president of marketing and strategic solutions at Fatwire, Mineola, N.Y. "Executives in lines of business have previously focused only on risk mitigation goals and other operational goals, but now they are looking to put content to use, to yield customer insights or provide a sales environment that can help corporations meet revenue goals."

Websites aren't digital brochures anymore, but it's not always clear what they are in transition to becoming. As site publishers experiment, a wide range of capability is called for. In McNabb's report on CM, the analyst compared the effectiveness of vendor functions that include content repository services and multi-site management.

With those demands, have come IT requirements that are equally stringent. "IT desires strong architecture, integration, extensibility, usability, and control," McNabb writes. By this he means code that is based on standards and is easy to work with. Extensibility, for instance, is the ability to integrate "code snippets" (from an open source coding site or other sources) to provide additional publishing functionality.

Different users, different needs

IT developers and administrators; site managers and power users; content contributors and business users all work with CM systems. All value different capabilities. "Site managers want more control of site design and layout," says Byrne of CMS Watch.

"They want dynamic content that gives customers a better experience." This could be anything from superior graphics to targeted messaging to even custom, spot-delivered product offers.

For the site designers and contributors, it is no easy task learning a content management system, according to Byrne. "Like any other software, CM systems have their quirks and take ample training time to master," he explains. He thinks that throughout the maturing process, much of CM's capability has been oversold by zealous sales staffs.

"These systems are probably more difficult to customize than users first believe," says Byrne. "It's not as easy to import legacy content or to override a default function."

The need for "portal control" comes at a time when enterprises are trying to manage, organize, and search content strewn throughout their operational footprint, writes analyst Lou Latham, with Gartner, Stamford, Conn.

The need for easy access will drive worldwide information search license revenue to $368.9 million in 2006, up 10% from the year before. "Enterprise information access technologies are entering a new phase of deployment and use," said Tom Eid, research vice-president at Gartner, in a press release. "Indexing, querying, presentation, and drill-down of results will increasingly become common capabilities."

Content management vendors mentioned in this story:

ECM/Documentum

Hopkinton, Mass.,(508) 435-1000

WWN.software.emc.com

Fatwire Software

Mineola, N.Y.,(516) 328-9473

www.fatwire.com

Interwoven

Sunnyvale, Calif.,(408) 774-2000

www.interwoven.com

Percussion Software

Woburn, Mass., (800) 283-0800

www.percussion.com

Sitecore

San Rafael, Calif., (415)444-0600

www.sitecore.net

Stellent, Inc.

Eden Prairie, Minn., (877) 332-9567

www.stellent.com

Tridion U.S.A.

New York, N.Y., (646) 792-2247

www.tridion.com

Vignette

Austin, Tex., (888) 608-9900

www.vignette.com

Lauren Bielski, senior editor