Agile CMS – what does Agile mean to you?

Arjen van den Akker 24 Feb 2021 5 min read

It’s interesting to see how the CMS space continues to evolve and in particular how it’s being reported by the analyst community. With both Gartner and Forrester having abandoned the WCM (Web Content Management) space as a dedicated market, coverage has moved in two main directions:

DXP (Digital Experience Platforms) – covered by both Gartner and Forrester
Agile CMS (Content Management System) – Forrester’s latest take on this market

As I’ve outlined before in my blog a year ago, we decided to stop participating in the DXP reports because over time the scoring and weighting criteria changed heavily in favor of vendors that own all the technology pieces that make up a DXP (WCM, commerce, analytics, email, social, CDP, the list goes on), at the expense of vendors who follow an integration strategy like we do.

We were thrilled to be invited by Forrester to take part in the Now Tech: Agile Content Management Systems, Q1 2020 report, which was followed by The Forrester Wave™: Agile Content Management Systems (CMSes), Q1 2021, published late February 2021.

It’s the first time Forrester has published a Wave on this topic, so it was hard to truly understand upfront what Forrester would focus on and what would drive their scoring / rating methodology. Based on our discussions late 2019 / early 2020, we learned it would be important for an Agile CMS to combine the best of practitioner-friendly Web CMS products, with the development flexibility / agility of the leaner headless CMSes, further enriched with content planning, collaboration and content insights, while ensuring governance.

Forrester’s definition of an Agile CMS

A solution for collaboratively curating, creating, and delivering content across channels and campaigns via iterative development and deployment processes.

We were excited to see this category being defined, since it plays well into Tridion’s strengths:

Our new Tridion UI called Experience Space offers great practitioner tooling
Our unique BluePrinting® capabilities offer the ultimate in content reuse
Our decoupled architecture and headless delivery capabilities use GraphQL, whereas most of the CMS market is still catching up on GraphQL usage (confirmed by the report)
Our 100% template-less publishing in Tridion Sites 9.5 and later
Our advanced Integration Framework and excellent integration with Aprimo for both DAM and Work Management (aka MRM), based on rich APIs at the front-end and back-end that enable developers to easily embed Tridion in a larger digital ecosystem

Forrester did change the traits of an Agile CMS throughout time. In their Q1 2020 Now Tech report they state it needs to support:

Content reuse across channels and campaigns (by componentizing content and using a common backend system)
Faster, more efficient content operations (by using content components and using analytics feedback loops)
Happier practitioners with smarter collaborative tools (flexible yet structured tools, intuitive workflows, automate mundane tasks)

In the recently issued Wave, Forrester redefined the 2nd criteria into:

Support developers with technical capabilities to build unique experiences (flexibility and extensibility of front-end components and back-end architecture coupled with deep documentation, training, and community capabilities for developers)

It’s clear that this newly defined category will continue to evolve. Still we feel Tridion aligns really well with these definitions.

When Agile becomes ambiguous

Our expectation of The Forrester Wave™: Agile Content Management Systems (CMSes), Q1 2021 was that there should be no real Leaders, especially since the Agile CMS category is new, partially undefined, and there is lots of room for improvement from all vendors. What surprised us though was that some vendors – with no real headless CMS capabilities – were positioned as Leaders in the report. Even though their lack of proper headless delivery features were noted.

For us – and our customers – strong headless capabilities should be the backbone of any Agile CMS. We were also surprised to see that some offerings, which lagged in workflow and approval capabilities, faired particularly well, whereas efficient content operations is a key characteristic of an Agile CMS.

Tridion – a quick summary

If you haven’t seen the report, I’ll briefly outline the key messages around Tridion, which receives the highest score (5 points out of 5) for its Content Repository capabilities, and on-par rankings for personalization and experience management. Strangely enough our Decoupled Delivery yielded a lower score, even though Tridion has been 100% decoupled since its inception, and the same is true for Metadata and Taxonomy management in spite of strong metadata capabilities and built-in features for managing multiple multilingual taxonomies that even adhere to Tridion’s unique BluePrinting® feature.

Key observations include:

Tridion scores high (4.4 out of 5) as a Content Hub, demonstrating the technology’s ability to orchestrate a complex content ecosystem. Forrester correctly points to Tridion’s ability to handle complex content scenarios
Tridion was recognized joint-second as leaders in “Partner Ecosystem,” “Delivery Model,” “Market Approach,” “Supporting Products,” and “Supporting Services

My personal conclusion

Overall this report lists vendors that represent certain elements of an Agile CMS, whereas they fall short in other areas and the anticipated ultimate ideal Agile CMS. For your own (future) CMS selection process I think it’s crucial to decide how you want to make your business more agile, and what agility you need from your CMS – headless publishing, or maybe a hybrid with old-fashioned WYSIWYG editing as well, reuse of componentized content, developer tooling, interoperability with the rest of your stack, a modern looking UI and so on.

I’m sure that Forrester’s newly defined category will continue to evolve, so we’ll keep a close eye on what’s going to happen there as well.

In the meantime – we are more than happy to demonstrate what Tridion can do for you. Besides technology, we think it’s crucial to look at your processes too. So if you’re interested in the full story, make sure you don’t just look at Tridion as a product, but also consider our dedicated Content Supply Chain Advisory Service to become even more agile.

Arjen van den Akker

Senior Director Product Marketing

Arjen van den Akker has a 25+ years background in computer engineering and marketing and has worked at a series of international B2B software vendors. He joined SDL in 2012 (acquired by RWS in 2020) and works as Senior Director of Product Marketing for RWS’s digital experience and content management solutions.

All from Arjen van den Akker