EMC plans new Web content management tool

Storage giant EMC plans another foray into Web content management with the upcoming launch of a tool to handle content layout as well as management.

Due to become generally available in the fourth quarter of this year, EMC's Documentum Page Builder, unveiled Tuesday, is designed to make it easier for nontechnical users to create, manage and deploy Web sites for their companies.

"More and more people want to do more than just create Web sites; they want to influence way the site is presented," Greg Dierickse, senior product marketing manager at EMC for Web content management products, said.

More organizations are looking for their employees with business knowledge and less technical know-how to become actively involved in Web site development, Lubor Ptacek, director of product marketing for content management marketing at EMC, said.

Traditionally, business users haven't had much or any input into how Web sites are laid out, the content they contain and how the sites operate, meaning that those sites can often fall short of what businesses had hoped to achieve with them.

Page Builder takes a component-based approach to Web site creation and management so that users can reuse static or dynamic components such as headers, footers or navigation to quickly pull together Web pages, Dierickse said. Based on XML (extensible markup language), the EMC tool supports and complements Adobe Systems' Dreamweaver templates so EMC users can modify templates that have been created in the Dreamweaver Web development tool.

EMC has been working on Page Builder for about a year. "It's step one in a longer term road map," Dierickse said, as EMC looks to strike a balance between advanced functionality and ease of use. The next likely direction will be for the company to develop a product to help nontechnical users develop Web applications as well as manage content and layout, he added.

The cost of Page Builder will depend on a user's IT configuration, but Dierickse estimated that the starting price could be under $100,000.

Page Builder will be a new member of EMC's Web content management suite, which includes a number of products such as Documentum Portlet Builder and Documentum Web Publisher. The new tool will also support EMC's Documentum enterprise content management platform and so will be able to draw upon capabilities including a unified repository and business process management, Dierickse said.

In the Web content management arena, EMC competes with players like Interwoven and Vignette. The storage vendor is currently the No. 1 overall enterprise content management player in revenue terms, according to market research company IDC, although IBM, the No. 2 vendor, is set to overtake EMC, should its planned bid to acquire the No. 3 company FileNet be successful.

EMC has been steadily building up its expertise in content management over the past few years, making some acquisitions along the way including the purchases of enterprise content management player Documentum in December 2003 and document capture software vendor Captiva late last year.

Looking ahead, EMC is keen to continue strengthening the ties between its content management software and its archiving capabilities, Ptacek said. That move got a boost back in April when EMC released products based on Documentum technology to archive e-mail messages and reporting data from enterprise applications. The vendor is likely to provide archiving for other forms of content such as video and audio, he added, with the eventual intention in several years' time of developing a unified method for archiving all content types.