Enterprise CMSs to keep an eye on, and do they play nice with Dynamics 365?

Enterprise content management systems have certainly come a long way, with the lines between social, marketing and traditional online engagement platforms becoming more and more blurred.

Content management systems themselves have become more like a CRM and CRMs have become more like Content Management Systems.

Modern content management systems, are now more than ever being flexibly deployed as a CaaS (Content as a Service), have rich marketing automation functionality, in-built customer relationship management, workflow, invoicing, order and often inventory management – actually I’m not sure if you can even refer to them as just content management systems.

And at the same time CRM’s such as Dynamics 365, are no longer just about ERP or Customer Relationship Management, they promise to completely transform your back office through field servicing, artificial intelligence, resource management, and of course their old stomping ground of sales and service management.

Why don’t we have one solution that encompasses the best of both worlds you may ask? The reality for many enterprise organisations is that no two deployment scenarios will be identical. CRMs and CMSs are as diverse as business needs.

While Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portals does a pretty good job as a SME or a point-solution, it was never intended to replace a full enterprise CMS.

So that leaves us with a best of breed architecture for enterprise. A powerful CRM platform, matched with a suitably powered ECMS. And with two platforms, we now have an integration problem that needs to be resolved. So firstly …

Who are the leading Enterprise Content Management Systems currently?

I touched upon this at the start of the year with the blog titled “Portal Platform Shootout for Dynamics 365 – 2018”). I still think that’s a pretty good list, and some of the vendors on that list have made further improvements since the time I wrote the article.

But I wanted to be a little more objective this time, and lead with the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Management Systems (published in July 2018).

We should all be familiar with these Magic Quadrant charts, but I do recommend that you read the full article to gain an understanding about the strengths and cautions of each product along with the weightings and methodology used, you can view this here:

https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-549T1TG&ct=180622&st=sb

Next, I’ll break this down into options for integrating with Dynamics 365 and integration for Active Directory. Included below are hyperlinks that direct you to the page where it has been confirmed there is an native connector for Dynamics 365 or AD. Where I have not been able to confirm, I will indicate as so (if you can provide me with supporting evidence for any unconfirmed entries, I will gladly update).

The most challenging aspect has been pricing of respective CMSs. Where there are published pricelists, I will include them. Unfortunately, most are by quotation only and that affect pricing such as traffic volume, hosting models, included professional services, and so on.

The above is meant to provide a high level summary of integration options, and it should be noted that while no native integration exists, most CMSs do offer APIs that allow for custom connectors.

Ideally it would be nice understand if each of the vendors has Dynamics 365 integration on their roadmap, however with time constraints I am not able to reach out to each vendor personally. I would love it if this sparked a conversation within their respective product teams, and if they would consider supporting Dynamics 365 – I know there are many of us in the Dynamics 365 community would gladly assist them in making it happen.

Hope you found my article interesting, if you have any comments please do drop me a message.