Is a WCM Game-Changer Brewing In Basel? (On the Appification of Applications)
Basel-based Magnolia CMS has many of the trappings of the typical small software vendor. Foosball table? Check. Team dinners at a long communal table? Check. Smart, hard-working co-founders who complete each other’s sentences and still radiate enthusiasm over a decade after the company’s launch? Jawohl!
Design magazines in the WC
But then, the Foosball table is standing not under acoustic tiles and flickering fluorescent lights, but on a large terrace overlooking the Rhine river. The headquarters is located not in a suburban office park, but near Basel’s historical center, surrounded by art galleries. And the most prominent reading material on the bookshelf[!] in the water closet is the design magazine Metropolis.
Design figures significantly in all things Magnolia. When friends asked founders Pascal Mangold and Boris Kraft why they would want to create a new WCM in 2003 (aka, “Aren’t 1500 existing content management solutions a sufficient curse on mankind?”), Mangold and Kraft justified it in the name of improved usability and user experience (UX).
Nine years later, Magnolia has established itself as an attractive Java-based, open source CMS. Revenues are growing nicely, enterprise-level projects are on the rise, and the entry into the North American market is paying off.
The appification of enterprise applications
But what keeps Mangold and Kraft up at night (and coming to work in the morning) is UX. When they began preparations for version 5 a couple of years ago, here’s what they added to the pot:
The dramatic expansion of smart phones and tablets.
The rise of the on-the-go mobile professional.
Gartner’s claim that “Users are looking to use tablets . . . for content creation as well as for participation in content review and approval processes.”
The introduction of iOS interaction patterns and gestures to the PC with Apple’s OSX Lion.
You can stir all of this over the considerable heat generated by the relentless user demand for the “appification of applications” (my term, don’t blame Magnolia) — that is, the expectation that enterprise apps should be as easy — indeed, as pleasurable — to use as “App Store apps.”
WCM? There’s an app for that.
The result, for Magnolia, is an entirely new user interface. In the development version demonstrated at their user conference in September 2012, this UI:
Looks like an app, and quacks like an app. Top level navigation consists of (just) three icons, representing the app library (see screen shot below), the “Pulse” (activity stream and versioning), and favorites.
Adopts iOS interaction paradigms for both the iPad and the Apple PC — e.g., pinching, swipes, scrolling.
Allows extensions and enhancements through the installation of app modules (company or community created) that will be available in an app marketplace.
Is, according to Mangold, so easy to understand that both new and existing users can begin working almost immediately. (Important, because the new UI makes no concessions to existing users familiar with version 4.5 or earlier.)
Is, literally, WYSIWYG. WCM vendors have announced plenty of “all new” UIs in recent years, but often they amounted to a slick but shallow set of tools for “casual” users. All of the heavy lifting was still done in the creaky old UI. Mangold and Kraft assert that this one is all new, all the way down. There is no other there there.