Final Evaluation: Marqui CMS Review - Part VI

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Here I am, ready to give some very personal summary evaluation and assessment to the Marqui CMS.

This reporting effort is part of my paid assignment for Marqui. The research and reporting work done so far by me on the Marqui CMS (see list at the bottom of this article), has been entirely paid for by Marqui as part of its awareness and promotional blogosphere program.

My overall impression with the Marqui CMS is a positive one.

I think the software as a service approach, the feature set, the cost-effective formula, the innovative marketing and sales strategies adopted and the actual CMS engine have all, great, great potential.

Marqui has indeed plenty of opportunities ahead and it is only up to itself whether it is going to grab them or not.

Here is my summary review and suggestions to this new hosted content management system provider:

Features and Functionalities
The Marqui CMS has nothing to envy to other popular and sometimes much more expensive content management systems. It integrates all of the basic functionalities a good CMS needs to provide, while keeping the system reasonably uncomplicated and unthreatening to the non-technical user.

Version control & archiving
Version control and document tracking are some of the advanced Marqui content management facilities that are available to all users. Ability to roll-back, version, and track content gives an audit trail of who made changes and when they were made -- plus the ability to restore content when necessary.

Automatic menu creation
The Marqui CMS integrates a handy menu building interface which simplifies the creation and management of complex navigation systems across the site. On the other hand features like the Menu Builder are not as simple and intuitive to use as they should be. Such critical controls should be as easy to access as possible for all users and especially for the non technically-skilled professionals.

Integrated e-Mailing facilities
The integrated email engine facility can be a blessing for those organizations needing to manage from a central repository different content types across multiple media channels. Content created through the CMS can be easily repurposed across Web, email, text, and other types of media formats.

Ease of Use
While the overall management interface and controls appear neatly designed and well-organized on the Marqui screen, the usability, intuitiveness and ease of use of the Marqui CMS still have good margins of improvement. The issue here is not to have a "neat" looking interface, but rather one that maps precisely to the tasks and workflow steps a site editor normally goes through. Some functions and facilities are not easy to find, and terminology it is not always clear and unambiguous. The system needs to reflect more the application tasks rather than its structural design.

Accessibility
The Marqui CMS requires the use of IE both for maintaining security as well as to provide full access to its interface controls. This is to certainly to be improved. Cross-browser support is the only way to go.
Possible additional areas for improvement include the introduction of control shortcuts that can facilitate and speed up certain tasks, the removal of graphic-only interface components, full support for unicode language alphabets.
Read more about these issues.

Publishing Workflow
The Marqui online CMS provides a publishing workflow solution that makes the editorial team work effective and reliably like in a modern online newspaper: all changes made by individual authors go into an approval queue that is controlled by a designated Editor (a 'Maestro' user in Marqui own terminology). The Editor reviews, edits, and approves the changes that will be published.

The Marqui system also allows multiple authors/contributors within your organization to access and contribute to the publishing workflow. In this scenario each author is assigned to a particular Editor that finally approves and authorizes the new content created. With this publishing workflow multiple publishing teams can achieve some level of publishing independence while perfectly integrating themselves into the overall institutional standards and formats of the mother organization.

Customer Support
Help and online documentation need to be fully upgraded. The present support documentation is organized around the interface metaphor and not around typical tasks a professional editor would carry out. Tutorials and illustrated guides are altogether missing. Good examples? Look at Groove, Macromedia, or Articulate for inspiration.

Until the system cannot sell itself on its own merit through its online demo, try-out and featured examples, effective sales and marketing costs will be painful knives in Marqui's side.

Security
The Marqui CMS provides a robust set of access rights allowing specific users and groups to have access only to pre-designated content areas and functions.
The Marqui online CMS uses 128-bit encryption for all of its data communications, guaranteeing privacy and security to all the data in transfer through the Marqui online CMS. As your content remains on your own servers, and not on Marqui's ones, your data is kept secure all along.

Some Suggested New Features

Support for RSS. Integrate automatic generation of RSS feeds for both the output of any content, as well as for selected internal management operations (posts to be approved in the queue, images loaded in the library, etc.). Consider seriously also possible partnership with RSS feed customization and tracking service like SyndicateIQ or SimpleFeed.

Support for Categories. Stronger support for content categories allowing content distribution based on category selection.

Support for Comments. Provide option to allow comments facilities in order to expand support to all those organizations wishing to establish a more direct relationship with their audiences.

Support for end-user subscription features. Integrate subscription facility allowing easy integration of code into the site to support newsletter subscribers, RSS feed subscription, email alerts on specific category topics and more.

Support for integrated sell-side advertising. Provide integrated ability to create and display text-based advertisements on selected sections (article types/ or categories of the site). My idea is for a hosted and personalized version of Blogads, whereby the CMS provides me also with the unique ability to sell ad space on my site in a completely automated and self-serving fashion. Given the times and the growing number of small independent online news outlets this could be a truly valuable addition.

Marketing Strategy
On the marketing end, my personal suggestions are:

Offer an effective try-out. One that allows the prospective customer to fully try-out the system over the arc of multiple sessions.

Offer a bare-bone version of the Marqui service completely for free. Enable in this way small departments and early adopters to take immediate benefit of the system while providing Marqui with unique product development feedback, wider and much faster market penetration, and, where deserved, trustworthy promotion and testimonials. Then offer key additional features and services at a price, while maintaining a corporate full offering that integrates the whole Marqui toolset.

Diversify the service for different user groups. Offer basic level hosted CMS with blog-like features. Offer multiple language support, advanced features and support options at higher prices. Stop thinking that the product is for one type of client/budget /use. Differentiate. Provide options, do not impose rules. (Consider for example entering the more lucrative multi-user/community blog market, by adding some blog like functionalities on top of your existing core infrastructure. Who said that a CMS needs to be used only for traditional publishing chores. There is a booming market of tools and software to serve groups of corporate bloggers, group blogs and community blog networks. Why not diversify in this direction too?).

Provide as much public guidance, help, tutorials about the system, without restricting access to it only to paying customers. Publish some spectacular manuals and allow free access to them. This allows everyone to appreciate the system in full, and its a unique opportunity to allow prospective customers to explore the tool in more detail.

Create public demos. This has got to be an essential requirement for marketing such a system. A series of prototyped real-world implementations that potential users can tinker with. The more applications are reflected through these, the more options for the potential customer to identify himself with one.

Showcase great implementations. Give great prominence to the existing success stories. Showcase successful implementations and create in-depth case studies around them. Exemplify the steps adopted by each showcased customer to make the Marqui CMS a successful component of their communication strategy.

Improve Site. The Marqui site lacks critical content information sections about the product and its features. Too much of the site is about the buzz and not about the product. A prominent link providing access to the CMS features and characteristics is sorely missing (all you can learn about the Marqui CMS is collected in this page: http://www.marqui.com/Solutions/) The lack of immediately accessible pages providing detailed information about the product in terms of system requirements, modules, integration capabilities, references and examples of successful implementations make the initial information gathering approach by a potential new customer highly frustrating.

Show the tool. Nonetheless it may not be the traditional way that large enterprises use to select a CMS, Marqui should showcase its interface, functions and facilities like a brand new Ferrari. Keeping the product hard to see is not a good strategy in today's highly visual and skeptical marketplace. The try-out access is not enough. It requires times and competence.

Provide more factual information. Start from your product page and drop all those fluffy marketing additions. Think of a microscope spec sheet. Provide good, in-depth detailed information. Your customers are by definition efficient people who do not want to waste time after technology; so treat them as such. Give them plenty of ways to find immediately what we all want to know first when checking out a product:
a) What does it do (overview + detail)
b) How much does it cost (in detail)
c) What does it look like
d) What exact features does it have
e) What has been created by others using it
f) How easy it is to use (try-out / demo)

Have a voice
Not just on your blog. Across all of your communications. Can't ride the blogosphere if you aren't as upfront, direct and up-to-date with the way you communicate across your media. If you want to keep paying bloggers to talk about you, you need to become rapidly as good as them in using these communication channels. Why haven't you hired one yet?

Understand what your Marqui blog is for and use it. A company blog is not for you to start being another blog site pointing readers to what is happening out there. We have enough of those smart radars around, thanks. Your job with your blog is to tell us your story. What is happening today at Marqui? When is the next product release and why it is again late? What is the latest request from your customers you have received in your forums? (don't have a forum? just add it to the list). You need to have an ongoing OPEN CONVERSATION with us (early adopters, analysts, the media) and with your customers and this needs to happen through your blog. It must be a two-way conversation, not a monologue.

Stop asking for a registration to hand out a mediocre white paper. Have some of these bloggers write a serious one for you and post it out for free on your front page. Don't you know that the perception created by companies that request a registration to access a whitepaper is one of being completely fake? The idea that you convey is that the whitepaper is a totally commissioned write-up, with no heart or part in it, and that you have spent money to have it done so that you could collect all of our emails. I don't think that works too well. For your next white paper, give a budget to your selected bloggers to write THEIR OWN report about the ideal CMS for the small and medium company, and see what they come up with.

Pricing
Marqui rightly promotes his software as a service offering as being extremely cost-effective. Starting at USD 199/month the Marqui offering really makes a great first positive impression unless you look at the fine print.

The contract lasts a minimum of one year and billing it's not on a monthly basis. That reads USD 2,397 for the first year. And you can't bail out after three months if it doesn't work for you.

That may need some rethinking at least in terms of how the offer is worded. The more transparency, the better.

Communication
Nonetheless Marqui has been a true pioneer and innovator in the marketing communication approach that it has chosen to adopt with its blogosphere program, ironically enough it has remained a very closed and uneasy company to deal with when it comes to communicating with the outside.

This may have been a unique experience on my hand, but nonetheless the staff at Marqui have all been very nice with me, I really haven't had the opportunity to learn more about them or to converse with them in a way that wasn't dictated exclusively by a very controlled and careful formality.

I have given a few tries at getting them as a team to talk to me online, but after the many promises, they never set a date to make this possible. Too bad.

They felt uptight, and maybe rightly so, as I have been grinding on their weaknesses and limitations more than anyone else. In any case, justified or not, the company didn't come out to me as "warm", direct, caring and with a tight and highly co-operative team behind it. Everything felt as it a bit awkward, unnatural, a bit bigger than life. The skin feeling was that Marqui, with its bold move in hiring bloggers to talk about itself, had moved into a realm where the need for transparency, prompt reaction, frankness and flexibility made the company look like a fresh fish out of the water.

In my humble opinion Marc Canter's marketing intuition remains of absolute value. The strategy is effective. It is the match that didn't feel right. Marqui sells and promotes what it would want to describe as an innovative product, but to experienced bloggers the Marqui system is not the El Dorado they could have imagined. Used to easy and intuitive interfaces, cool features and facilities, plugins, extended international support, bloggers knew more about content publishing than some of the Marqui people itself.

Marqui did not foresee the impact bloggers could have had on its self-perceived strengths and weaknesses nor it did anticipate the resources it needed to have to match the new instant conversations being started by the bloggers it paid.

But Marqui cannot think about it anymore. It doesn't have the time to. Marqui needs now to move boldly and rapidly forward while incorporating the best advice emerged from this innovative awareness program.

More than anything Marqui needs to transform itself into a company with a voice, with a distinguished personality and style: something that Marqui totally lacks right now. Marqui has to take the bold approach it has used to get our attention, to turn itself, its attitude and its unique product inside out. Not to throw away the many good things it has created but rather to start being more open to assimilate what it hasn't considered, tried or thought of before.

Positioning
There is a contradiction in terms. A hosted CMS can never be the technology of choice for the medium to large enterprise. These are by definition the business entities that more than any other one want to keep a high level of control on their assets and technologies. Large companies have no issues in spending adequate budgets when they have decided that a certain technology can be of use to them. Large companies want these technologies to be deployed in-house, as much as possible under their own terms, and they do not want to be dependent on external resources when such a service or infrastructure can be easily deployed/developed within the organization. There may be exceptions to this but this is what I see around me.

It is instead the small company, the home-based office, the academic team, who have tight budget issues, no dedicated internal IT department, and the need to operate on hosted solutions which give them maximum flexibility and performance at the lowest possible cost. But is Marqui addressing them?

There is indeed a whole lot more to say about Marqui, both for what it really offers as well as for what it could do greatly improve its offering and brave marketing attitude.