KnowledgeTree CMS Vendor Meme

Philip Arkcoll's picture
by Philip Arkcoll on Fri, 27 Mar 2009

Last week Day challenged CMS vendors to rate themselves against the reality-check checklist, suggested by CMSWatch’s Kas Thomas. Now, we don't provide WCM functionality and our focus is on being a point document management solution but, we thought that it would still be a worthwhile exercise to find out how well we measured up to the criteria in the checklist.

These are the rules:

  • A CMS vendor is challenged to honestly answer all items on the “Reality checklist for vendors” suggested by CMSWatch’s Kas Thomas (aka the “we-get-it checklist for vendors”).
  • If possible the vendor has supply screenshots, links or other means to make it easy to verify the answers.
  • The answers also need to be supplied in a short form of one to three stars (denoting “no”, “sort-of”, “yes”).
  • Answering all questions on his blog allows the vendor tag some other WCMS vendors.
  • A tagged vendor should provide a link back to the blog that tagged him.

Here's our response:

“WE GET IT” CHECKLIST FOR VENDORS

1. Our software comes with an installer program.

We provide Windows and Linux installers as well as a source release intended for use in manual installations.

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

No, our installer does not require a reboot.

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

Users select language on first login. There are a number of language packs built into the standard installation and others may be downloaded from our community forge.

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

Yes, here's the link

We also provide an online demo for those who don't have the time to install the evaluation version.

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

I'm not sure how well this applies to us, as we're a document management solution, but we do provide built-in templates for metadata, security and workflow functionality.

6. We ship a tutorial.

Yes, documentation and tutorials are available on our website.

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

No, support is provided through a separate customer portal.

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

There are some basic guides built into KnowledgeTree but the bulk of our documentation is on our website and wiki. This ensures that it is always up to date and allows our community to contribute to it.

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

As I've mentioned already we don't provide WCM functionality. That said, we do dog-food KnowledgeTree by using it as our internal document repository.

10. Our salespeople understand how our products work.

Absolutely, a number of our sales staff come from technical backgrounds and all go through continuous product training. We also have a pre-sales support team, who are on-hand to answer questions that require deep technical knowledge.

11. Our software does what we say it does.

Yes, absolutely. We're a point-solution for document management and that's what we do best.

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

No, it's free and released with our Community Editions which is licensed under GPLv3.

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

I'd say it is. We're very "what you see is what you get". There are no additional modules you end up having to license (and which the sales person didn't tell you you needed until you'd bought the software).

14. We have one price sheet for all customers.

Yes, it's on our website.

15. Our top executives are on Skype, Twitter, or some similar channel, and: Feel free to contact them directly at any time.

Our CEO and COO regularly post on our product blog. We also have corporate Facebook and Twitter accounts and our CEO is on Twitter as well.

Meme ID: 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf