I was just checking out this presentation by a couple former colleagues. Jonathan and Andre were at the OpenText User conference in Huntington Beach CA. These guys (and several colleagues back at the ranch in Toronto) are doing amazing custom work with the RedDot Web CMS product:
http://www.keebler.net/blog/2007/02/13/presentation-broadband-video-news-powered-by-reddot/
Jonathan in particular is getting to be a RedDot guru, and I gather the presentation was well-received. Here's a summary written by a knowledgeable attendee (who among other things says: "These guys are killer. I feel utterly humbled in their presence. I could only hope we might even attempt some of these things that they make sound like normal practice."):
http://www.sowrey.org/2007/02/13/broadband-video-news-powered-by-reddot-at-summit-2007/
CMS's are notoriously problematic to bring into large organizations, and many such projects fail. It's really good to see the time and effort being put into optimizing a system for the benefit of content managers -- normally the true arbiters of success for a CMS project. The work had also evidently sped up publishing times which is crucial kin the competitive online news field.
I was responsible for technology and operations at CHUM Interactive, and brought in RedDot in 2005. It's a very good product, but out of the box doesn't fully suit the needs of a past-paced 24/7 TV news environment. It's a good thing we started with smaller web sites that had less-exacting requirements. Admittedly our first couple implementations weren't pretty, but we hit our stride after about 6 months. By the spring of 2006 our RedDot-powered sites were quite good (imho).
In retrospect we created conditions for success by training and supporting motivated (and highly capable!) internal staff. Once there were 3 developers knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the product, things really started to cook. They don't all have to be the super-experts Jonathan is, but just need to complement each others skills.
I think CHUM now had the best RedDot practice in Canada, and perhaps even in North America. This is pretty remarkable given that the company is a TV/Radio broadcaster, and does RedDot work strictly to serve internal business needs. The darkish cloud on the horizon is that it may prove difficult in years to come to keep the team intact, as professional services firms will undoubtedly be able to pay more (and offer more varied projects) for this sort of focus and expertise. So for anyone in the media business thinking of standardizing on a web CMS product: don't expect to do it successfully without putting together a highly capable team. And don't expect to keep said team together without some energetic care and feeding!
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