Thu 24 Nov 2011
It was one of those days, where you get nothing done. You probably all know what that feels like. When you are employed it sucks for your boss, but that is something that can happen. When you are self-employed, you just can't write hours.
Not all was lost today however. I have communicated with the marketing team once again that we need to step up our marketing activities. I have received a number of mails the past weeks asking how we can promote TYPO3 better in the face of our biggest competitor Drupal. Drupal is gaining more ground as I type this. Of course Drupal is backed by Acquia that is able to spend loads of money on marketing and education. The fact that we have a CMS that excells in a number of area's does not market itself. I am sure we have a lot of potential in our userbase to get proper marketing going, but I need to find those people. We have an awesome design team that we can connect to our marketing efforts. The new brand- and yearbook from TYPO3 by Rasmus Skjoldan, that will be released end of this year, will also be important for marketing. So marketing is in focus!
me
how about setting up some sort of a TYPO3 roadshow with fixed (maybe you and some volunteers?) and flexible staff from various TYPO3 agencies.
Usually we could try to get in touch with the marketing clubs in each bigger city. IMHO they are always glad to get some events for their members - at least here in Mönchengladbach.
Also I could try to make a connection to b2d (http://www.dialogmesse.de/) they already have a TYPO3 site and contacted us a while ago if we would like to develop it further at no cost giving us a booth at their fairs. This could lead to a win:win situation for everybody.
Best regards,
Boris
I would call the TYPO3 to Drupal content mudslinging (and though common enough here I would not call it a US approach). I think it was a pretty short sighted move, but it clearly came from Acquia and not the general Drupal community.
tHNx for your great insights. That is something else then trolling ;-) I have some really good contacts with Drupal people and I am mostly an idealist wanting to have a good cooperation and trying to achieve results in our mutual OS cooperation. I do realise that Drupal needs to get results now, because the investors need to get a return of their million dollars investment. I have had numerous awesome contacts with these folks and it is my wish we could act together on the opensource front. Lately there has been communication from Drupal with promoted tweets in the TYPO3 timeline and the whole story about migration from Drupal to TYPO3 that had a very negative, maybe US approach, probably initiated by that urge for return of investment. We need to get out of our developer shell and communicate. That is something that not only goes for TYPO3, but also for a great number of other OS projects. LibreOffice seems te be a very good example of a project that has their shit together properly.
I am optimistic and see we have a great future ahead of us with the developments in the current branch, FLOW3 and our new next-gen CMS.
We will get there and we will are a community product Inspiring People To Share.
gRTz ben
What saddens me slightly, though, is that the impression seems to exist that Drupal is our big competitor here. If we're serious about the "enterprise" as in "TYPO3 is an enterprise CMS", then Drupal is not the competition at all. Neither is something like Wordpress. Sure, for hobby sites and blogs definitely. But the he products TYPO3 ought to beat into a shameful pile of pulp are the likes of SiteCore, SDL Tridion, MS Sharepoint, things like the Google Search Appliance product vs SOLR.. heck.. even Facebook is 'the competition' more than Drupal is.
What I see in practice is that enterprises aren't looking for a CMS that just outputs cool websites anymore. They all do that and it's what Wordpress is for. What I'm seeing around me as I interact with others in large organisations similar in size to my workplace (10000+ souls), is a strong push towards manageable total concepts for information management.
The CMS needn't necessarily be everything to everyone, like Sharepoint is miserably failing to do, but it should at least connect effortlessly to other products that are (perceived to be) best of breed for a particular purpose.
This means TYPO3 shouldn't fight Drupal but instead work to integrate effortlessly with stuff like Documentum, Autonomy, Sharepoint, the whole slew of Google API-products like Maps or Analytics and all those other big-name products.
Most of these guys don't inspire people to share, which doesn't fly very well with "our kind of people". A fact we should -in my opinion- be proud of, as it is exactly this sharing attitude that makes OSS awesome and what keeps the community around it together at all.
Competing against another OSS product like Drupal for market share feels like infighting to me. Every successful Drupal-based portal is one less Sharepoint-abomination to pollute the internet. And I'm not saying this because I hate Sharepoint as a product or Microsoft as a company per se. What I intensely dislike is its licensing model and the way that traps you inside a vendor lock-in. Any company that chooses Drupal or TYPO3 over a lock-in product is a win in my book.
Obviously TYPO3 doesn't have the resources to be the killer CMS it would need to be to take on all those huge commercial products it competes against. However, if TYPO3 becomes the best content editing platform on the planet -which I believe Phoenix has the potential to be- it must be able to play nice with the Dark Side.
"No, TYPO3 doesn't support archiving different states of our corporate website over time." That's what I had to admit to our CIO recently, simply because it's true. Had I been able to add: "..but it is able to dump all of its frontend -in an accurate and fully functional, flat HTML format- into a DMS like Documentum if we configure it to do so." that would have been a monumental win for TYPO3.
Marketeers ask similar things, like: "Why is there no menu-choice for analytics when I click a page-icon (or even an individual content element) in the backend?" They want their marketing figures straight from the same system they're editing content in. Preferably without the legal vagueries surrounding apparent freebies like Google Analytics. Just like they'd absolutely love care-free import/export to Adobe InDesign.
What I'm describing here are huge tasks to implement. I'm very well aware of that, just like I know that I mysel lack the coding mojo to pull it off. But they are the kind of features that separate the men from the boys in the enterprises I'm in contact with.
Until TYPO3 grows some serious facial hair in this respect (why is LDAP still not in the core?), I personally will keep fighting the slightly uphill battle for its adoption anyway. Simply because I consider Free software the only viable long-term choice, and because TYPO3 is indeed already a damn good piece of software that I'm personally proud of and which can save many corporations millions in cash that can then be put to better use. Drupal? They're in the exact same boat as us, except they're still rowing while we have an aircraft carrier to play with.