The CMS Vendor Meme

Kas Thomas, analyst for CMS Watch, wrote down 15 checks for CMS vendors. Let's see how GX is doing:

1. Our software comes with an installer program.

Yes, both our free GX WebManager Community edition and our standard edition come with a windows .exe file that installs everything. After the installation you can click on the icons on your desktop or in the start menu and you're ready to go!

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

Nope.

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

Any user can switch languages at any time in the login screen. This preference is saved so after the first choice you don't have to think about language selection anymore.

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

Yes, anyone can download the latest version of our software as a Community Edition.

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

Yes, the GX WebManager Community Edition comes with a populated website with multiple layouts, personalization, tutorials, instruction videos, dashboard etc.

6. We ship a tutorial.

Yes, see answer 5.

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

Not yet, but nice suggestion thank you! On the positive side: we have an open bug tracker where anyone can see our open bugs and change requests. It's almost like open source! :-)

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

Online help is delivered with our software, but documentation is not part of the installation. Instead we choose to offer the latest documentation online (no login required!)

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

Of course!

10. Our salespeople understand how our products work.

Is that when account managers don't need demo specialists or presales consultants when they visit customers? Then I'd say yes!

11. Our software does what we say it does.

In order to get a fair and balanced answer you could drop this question in our forum: https://www.gxdeveloperweb.com/Forums.htm

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

No, even our free Community Edition allows you to develop your own designs, applications and components.

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

Yes,if this 5-year-old would pay a little bit of attention for a couple of seconds :-)

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.

CTO: http://twitter.com/njitram, CCO: http://twitter.com/barthei, Corporate twitter account (that would be me): http://twitter.com/gxnl for the latest product updates and gossip.

Conclusion

My conclusion after 15 answers is that we might loose some points in question 7 (-3) and 8 (-2) which would bring the score to 40 out of 45, which is a pretty nice result.

The easiest explanation for this results is the fact hat even though we are not an open source company we act like one when it comes to software development. We call this Open Development. When we started with this two years ago it was a huge step, but now we sometimes forget that anyone can test our software, see our documentation, see our bugs etc. Good for the competition, but even better for customers and developers because it will give them a better product in the end.

I'm pretty sure open source CMS vendors will get a goods score on the checklist above, but I would like to see the same for Smartsite, Tridion, Alterian etc. e.g. the commercial vendors. 

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