Once again the topic of MCMS vNext rears its ugly head! Mark talks a little about it here, with CMSWatch also covering what it calls 'growing unease'.
Now, firstly I'm not entirely sure why customers of a £40k product would email Tony, as opposed to speaking to their vendor account manager for information - but lets not get into the validity or otherwise of questions put to Tony!
I do know for a fact that certain competitors are spreading rumor and gossip about MCMS, however - this has happened recently in two customers I'm involved with - but the point here is what else is new?! The so-called enterprise cms crew never liked Microsoft - and after the acquisition derided the product as 'not enterprise ready', even though just a few months before, nCompass were a 'player to watch closely'. Using lack of news of an upgrade is simply an excuse to compete not with a better product but with rumor.
As for the next version itself - everybody knows there will be one - I mean is it feasible for Microsoft to stitch up the likes of Ford or the US Navy, or for that matter the enormous amount of public sector clients here in the UK, by not continuing to invest in MCMS? Of course not! In addition it has been stated publicly, and often, by MSFT that investment and support of its 'Information Worker' tools and tech will only increase going forward. It's also worth bearing in mind that some MCMS customers use MCMS and little else MSFT software.
So what about the technology - well again most of this is just obvious, even without the public statements of certain 'softies - and can be gleaned from the direction of MSFT 'portal' technology in general and the way in which it has developed other 'web' products since the days of Site Server. There will be greater parity and integration with SPPT, with more common back-ends, approaches, APIs and management tools. Just like all the other developer/service focused offerings.
As I said, this is obvious for those working with MCMS and SPPT, but more importantly, ASP.NET. Mark also mentions the job adds that I originally posted about in July last year (interesting that they are still available :)) which give some indication of direction, or at least thinking.
I mean if we get back to reality here, MCMS is only a 'second generation' product - MCMS 2001 was simply a re-branding of Resolution 4, with 2002 being primarily VS.NET integration and a bunch of managed wrappers for the API. So the next version, when it does arrive, will be a substantial improvement with the architectural changes needed to accomplish this goodness. Microsoft has done a good job of getting it to the forefront in relatively short time - it doesn't have the benefits of say Commerce Server, which has been a MSFT product in one form or another for seven years.
A certain view is that three years is too long to wait, but if you have 50,000 pages served thru MCMS you are not gonna be upgrading that sucka every year, unless you are stuck with a product which is never willing to change architecturally, either to benefit from improvements to the platform, or new ideas - and lets face it - most of us know a few CMSs like that! With the next version hopefully becoming a true MSFT product - three years is fine with me, especially if it means the death of those 'orrible management interfaces! :)
Still, "why no news?" seems to be the topical question. But who cares? I mean it seems to be the vogue that MSFT should get slated for its promotion of 'vaporware' such as Longhorn. With MCMS, they are keeping their mouths shut until they know what the product is going to look like. I for one am not gonna complain about that. Once the approach is set is the time to make announcements.
Another point that backs this up is that it was only last year that MCMS became part of the Office group - before it had been much more closely aligned with Commerce and BTS. Dan Kogan's card read 'CMServer Group'! No doubt moving from the Content Connector to Spark has given the team some great new ideas for what remains a very big difference between content management and document management.
Regardless of the hoopla, good Content Management is good Content Management - it's not about the product. When MCMS was launched the PMs made a great effort to stress that the product was service led - i.e. you don't get an out of the box experience and it will drive service revenues due to the need to hire someone to develop the solution.
Four years on this is still the case - only recently have reasonable 'speed up your MCMS' packages become available. Even today these are bitty, poorly tested, and too hard to integrate. Only Microsoft in fact offer a true enterprise ready solution today anywhere near this space, MSIB.
If you are using Content Management best practices, and focusing on the job in hand, rather than the technology, you will be ready for vNext - regardless of changes to its database schema, top level API objects, or for that matter the name of the product! :)
Rant over - I'm off to sling some strings.