Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | TuneIn | RSS
Preston SoThe CMS landscape has evolved a lot over the past couple of decades. Recently, headless CMSs and decoupled content architectures have appeared to address the need for omnichannel content experiences.
While their separation of the management of content from its presentation offers many benefits, these systems have left many users dissatisfied and disillusioned.
Preston So argues that the solution to this situation is universal CMS.
We talked about:
- the unique place in the software world that CMSs occupy
- how the need for cross-functional collaboration in a CMS drives the need for something like a universal CMS
- how the focus of headless CMSs on the developer experience has affected the end-to-end experience in content architectures
- his thoughts on the need for “a single UI to rule them all”
- the trends that have driven the move to decoupled architectures and headless CMSs
- the disconnect he sees between the need to address omnichannel content delivery and the expectations of content authors and editors
- the need in decoupled architectures for some level of “recoupling” of functionality so that “people understand what they’re doing”
- the challenges of managing content for omnichannel delivery
- the need to orchestrate content activities across functional teams
- the resistance in the market to complex architectures that require a variety of solutions
- the importance of constraining the number of mental models that people using CMSs have to hold in their heads
- the Universal CMS Summit that his company is hosting August 5 in Montreal
Preston’s bio
Preston So (he/they) is a product executive with over 25 years in software, 17 years in content technologies, and 9 years leading product, design, engineering, and developer relations functions at organizations such as Oracle, Acquia, dotCMS, Time Inc., and Gatsby. He is Vice President, Product at dotCMS and the author of Immersive Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2023), Gatsby: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly, 2021), Voice Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2021), and Decoupled Drupal in Practice (Apress, 2018).
Named “the smartest guy in the field” by Content Strategy for Mobile author Karen McGrane in 2024 and “probably the smartest person working in this industry right now” by Web Content Management author Deane Barker in 2020, Preston is a globally recognized authority on the intersections of content, design, and code. He is an editor at A List Apart and former top-read columnist at CMSWire. Preston is a frequent presenter with 17 years of speaking engagements spanning over 50 conferences, including SXSW Interactive (2017, 2017 encore, 2018) and An Event Apart (2020–22) and keynotes in three languages. He is based in New York City, where he can often be found immersing himself in languages that are endangered or underserved.
Connect with Preston online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 197. The tech world is in constant flux. And content management technology is no exception. Over the past decade or so, we’ve seen the arrival of headless CMSs and the introduction of decoupled content architectures. While that decoupling appeals to developers and offers new content-delivery opportunities, its abstractness and complexity have left many CMS users disillusioned and disoriented. Preston So argues that the solution to this situation is a universal CMS.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 197 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome back to the show Preston So. Preston’s my first three-time guest. And pro-tip for anybody trying to do that, just write a bunch of books and do interesting things and you also can be on three times. Preston is currently the VP of Product at dotCMS, a CMS company. Welcome, Preston. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Preston:
Hey, Larry. It’s a real pleasure to be back here at the Content Strategy Insights podcast for the third time, and thanks for having me back. It’s a real pleasure.
Preston:
I’m Preston So. I’ve been in the content management space for about 17 years, software for about 25 years as well. And over the last 10 years, I’ve been really focusing on the product angle of content management. I work as VP of Product at dotCMS, but you might also know me as the author of several books. I’ve written the books on decoupled Drupal or headless Drupal and Gatsby JS, and I’ve also written the books that are the authoritative guides to voice content strategy and immersive content strategy. It’s nice to be back, Larry.
Larry:
Yeah, it’s great to have you. And your latest, you’re just obviously clearly full of ideas and thoughts about the industry. And I think one of the latest ideas is this notion of the universal CMS, which is a term that you coined to address a problem that a lot of people are coming at it and from different directions. But I’d love to talk a little bit about that, but maybe dive in first to why that’s necessary. Where are we at in the evolution of CMS technology and why is something like a universal CMS needed now?
Preston:
Absolutely, and I’ll start off with a quick summary of what I’ve been noticing and also the definitions of universal CMS, and I’ll hop into a couple of stories and anecdotes here.
Preston:
Universal CMS is really catching on quite a bit in the CMS industry. It’s a term that really is about how the CMS will evolve in the future. I believe very strongly and we believe at dotCMS, and a lot of other folks across the CMS world also believe this, that we’re headed towards a very new generation of content management, and it’s what I call universal CMS. What I mean by that is that what we’ve seen over the course of the last five to 10 years is a CMS market that has evolved to become a little bit less viable and attractive for those who want to do things collaboratively in the CMS.
Preston:
The content management system occupies a very unique ecological niche in the world of software in that it’s a very unique hub of collaboration between very different personas and very different groups of people in the back office that need to do very, very different things. Somebody who might be looking at compliance, for example, or somebody who might be looking at HIPAA compliance if you’re in the healthcare world or in the health insurance world or in the pharmaceutical world might only hop into CMS once in a blue moon, but they still need to be able to do a lot of the same things that people that are on content teams and content practitioners do on a daily basis.
Preston:
The universal CMS is very interesting because of the fact that it really focuses on the end-to-end value stream that CMS has provided in their earliest generation in the static web CMS era, those legacy tools like Interwoven or Expression Engine or Movable Type, which really were focused on allowing for both developers and content editors and content authors to be able to work together within the same exact environment and using the same tools and meeting in the middle, so to speak, when it came to the CMS.
Preston:
I’ve heard from a lot of folks over the last few weeks in the last few months and the last few years, of course, that the current approaches that we’re seeing on the market are simply not viable. Obviously, over the course of the past 10 to 15 years, you’ve seen headless CMSs and composable CMSs really begin to revolutionize the way that developers and the way that architectures consume content, but you’re also now seeing on the hybrid headless or traditional side of things in the CMS market a shift away from just focusing on that content practitioner’s experience and moving more towards doing things more niftily, so to speak, with headless architectures and so on, so forth.
Preston:
But the problem is that these CMSs, especially in the headless and composable area of the market, have really focused on developers at the expense of content practitioners, marketers, compliance auditors, legal counsel, all the people that have to hop in the CMS to preview content across a variety of different assets and experiences. What they’ve done is they’ve focused quite a bit on architectural purism on a really clean separation of concerns, architecturally speaking, but they haven’t really resolved, so to speak, some of the restoration of key features and functionality that characterize that static web era for content authors, content editors, and everyone who works with content but not with code.
Preston:
By the same token, what you’re seeing now is in the hybrid headless CMSs, you’re seeing a lot of growth towards building more headless ecosystems, more developer-friendly ecosystems, more APIs. These are ways for people to actually extract content out of CMSs and build them into all the presentation layers they want to build, all their delivery channels. So the universal CMS is really about, well, how can we restore that end-to-end value stream, that grand compromise that really characterize that earliest generation of the CMS?
Preston:
Which is yes, the only experience that we had to serve content to was a single website, but now we have so many. We have different frameworks that are coming out every single week. We have Astro for example. We have Svelte for example that came out in the last few years. We also have other channels now that we have to serve, especially web-renderable channels. These are channels that are not necessarily on the webpage or on the web at all, but might still need to be previewed for compliance reasons or for preview reasons that editorial teams often have. But this is content that’s destined towards a very different source. This is content that’s destined to end up in a native mobile app or a in-store display or digital signage or augmented reality overlay, what have you. But all of these things still have to have a single UI to rule them all.
Preston:
There’s a really interesting story that I have from my years of architectural consulting. For those who don’t know, I do do some architectural consulting on the side and I specialize very deeply in headless and decoupled content architectures. I worked with a very well-known Fortune 500 company in Japan just a few years ago, and they had a really interesting story that really highlighted for me one of the biggest issues facing especially those in the enterprise today. If you look at this large company in Japan, they were working on a 10-year-long or 15-year-long migration over to a headless content architecture, but the problem was that their content editors and all their marketing teams, all their brand teams, all their digital teams still had to be able to use the CMS and the actual visual editor and visual assembly tools across all of those different experiences, regardless of what they were built in. So the architecture was a Drupal hub that actually had multiple Drupal sites on it, but also served content to a variety of other frameworks like React and Angular and BJS via Drupal’s GraphQL layer.
Preston:
But of course, one of the biggest needs of this group was to be able to actually edit all their content and visually administer all their content without actually surfacing those abstractions and surfacing those sorts of, let’s say, incongruences between the website itself that’s static and the traditional website and all the web apps that they needed to build, even also looking forwards to a lot of the things that are happening in terms of mobile and also other experiences as well.
Preston:
I spoke recently with a former CMO of a very large CMS company as well as a composable CMS brand startup, and one of the things that he shared is that the biggest reason why a lot of marketing teams, a lot of marketing functions, and a lot of folks in the content world are very disappointed right now and very disillusioned with CMS right now is because there is no consistency to how that end-to-end value stream is afforded to those who use the CMS. There is no way, for example, for a CMO to countenance 15 different user interfaces in the composable mindset that now need to be somehow glued together in ways that make sense to a content team, especially those who are infrequent users of the CMS.
Preston:
And by the same token, what we’re seeing is that a lot of folks that have seen visual editing capabilities before because they’re used to a lot of the visual editing capabilities that they saw in previous generations of CMS now feel like their hands are tied behind their back because of what they see lacking in the composable and headless CMS market. This same individual, the same executive, shared a story of a very large customer, an enterprise organization, that had bought a composable or headless CMS expecting to have visual editing and visual building and assembly capabilities available out of the box. Well, lo and behold, the first day of the contract came to bear and they actually were handed a statement of work for actually implementing a complete visual editing interface within a headless CMS that had been marketed or had been sold potentially as having had that functionality out of the box.
Preston:
So you’re seeing a lot of that dissatisfaction, a lot of that disappointment really come to a head in the CMS world, especially from the standpoint of those who work with content on a daily or a yearly basis.
Larry:
That last thing you mentioned, it points to there’s a… I’m reminded of that William Gibson quote, “The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” It’s like the past is here and it’s unevenly distributed, that a lot of those expectations that it sounds like that expectation, that that company that bought that headless CMS, they’re like, “Oh,” and it’ll still have all the stuff we had in the old monolith but, “Oh, no.”
Larry:
Which gets at one of the foundations of the concept of decoupling these architectures was that you would have an optimal editing experience for marketing people have different needs from product people, from technical documentation authors, from all these different kinds of people authoring stuff, but that doesn’t sound like the infrastructure is anywhere near there for that, or is that part of the problem that… Because you mentioned earlier also the variety of stakeholders and people with an interest in a CMS, and it sounds like and you’ve also mentioned the developer focus of it, so I’m going to guess off the top of my head that developers are well taken care of, but it’s a lot of those authors and other people who use the CMS that have been neglected. Is that safe to say, or…
Preston:
Yes, absolutely. And I think this really digs at I think one of the reasons why universal CMS is such a compelling term and why so many companies like Kentico and Crownpeak and TYPO3 and Magnolia have jumped on this term is that it really illustrates, I think, two very important trends. The first is that the whole reason why headless and decoupled CMS emerged in the first place is not necessarily out of a desire for architectural purity. I know that that’s a big reason why a lot of people like headless CMS, and I do agree that the cleanliness of the separation of concerns between content and its presentation is something that actually should be encoded in general in most CMS architectures. And it already was to a certain extent within the traditional and legacy CMS generation.
Preston:
But there’s one important thing that I think is very important here, which is that there was also a interesting change, an interesting evolution in the separation of concerns that happened because of developers. And that was universal JavaScript, this whole notion of Jamstack now moving towards the mock architectural approaches that we see. A lot of these things really came about because developers wanted to retake control from those monolithic systems that were very opinionated and very antiquated in many ways about how they wanted to template and theme out their front end. And so you have all these developers that are really frustrated with the state of actually having the right front end code in Java or PHP or Python or what have you, or Ruby, and they’re saying, “Well, no, what we actually want is a way to do that ourselves in ways that make sense to us.”
Preston:
The whole idea of universal JavaScript was the notion that you actually violate a very key separation of concerns by having JavaScript code that straddles both the client and server. If you remember from the late 1990s, early 2000s, there was a very, very clear separation of concerns that was between client and server, and you couldn’t really cross that barrier. What we’re seeing now, of course, is that you can, with JavaScript, with no JS on the server side, with front end JavaScript in a framework like React or what have you, you can actually now break through that wall, so to speak.
Preston:
And if I think about content teams, content teams are looking for a very similar kind of revolution, just as developers usurped the primacy of the old approaches to doing presentation within CMSs, what content teams want is actually to go back to what they had before in this new world. They’re asking for the moon, of course. They’re asking for us to take the moon and the sun and bring it down to earth, but it makes a lot of sense because what’s happening is a reduction in the value that CMSs are delivering to CMS practitioners, to content folks because they’ve lost functionality that they’ve seen for many years. And they’re being told by many headless and composable CMSs that what they’re actually looking for to get restored is actually wrong, which is simply not the thing you want to tell a customer.
Preston:
And I think there’s a lot of folks who are a little bit tired of being talked down to, very tired of being told that, “Well, this is just the way that the architecture has to work.” And I agree, the architecture is very solid. It’s the way that a lot of architecture should be, especially for the omnichannel future, but it’s not necessarily something that has all the bits and pieces and nuts and bolts that people want. And namely what I mean by that is a Universal Visual Editor that really straddles all of those different presentation layers, breaks through the wall, and also breaks down the separation of concerns much in the same way that Universal JavaScript did for developers, to break down that client versus server divide.
Preston:
What we need now is also some sort of a way to break through that separation of concerns that has been implicitly or abstractly created within organizations by the headless CMS, which is of course that division between people, the division between those who are content folks, those who are marketing folks, those who are compliance folks, those who are accessibility or design folks, versus those who are developing and actually writing the code. What we’re seeing right now is a huge wall that’s been erected between those two stakeholder groups and those two personas, and it’s really because of the fact that there’s no way really for content folks to do things that are really critical to their jobs because that was once a very key promise that the CMS made.
Preston:
And that’s why you’re seeing this pendulum swing back in the opposite direction. That’s why you’re seeing this, as Deane Barker calls it, a race to the middle. And Deane actually did share with me a little while ago that he would steal the term universal CMS from me if he could. But it’s very interesting when you look at the reason why this concept has such legs is that so many folks agree with the fact that headless and composable CMSs are simply not right for them. Maybe for a large technical bench or a large engineering team, it makes a lot of sense. If you have a SI you can work with, that makes sense.
Preston:
But for the vast majority of customers, what they’re looking for is something in the middle. They’re looking for something that has the benefits of headless and composable, but doesn’t limit them from all of the functionality that they used to have in the universal CMS. And it’s the reason why when I met with one of the big two analysts last week, this analyst who specializes in commerce said this is the same thing happening in commerce management right now, seeing the same exact trends. And also the reason why he called our presentation really, really incredible, and this is exactly the right thing to be thinking about. This is what they’re noticing as well. And it’s the reason why I think universal CMS is such an important concept. We’re already seeing this shift happen. There’s just not been a name for it. Apart from Deane Barker’s race to the middle, now universal CMS, and we’re seeing that already born out in things that we’re seeing from those that actually use the CMS and those who are customers.
Preston:
For example, at dotCMS, we actually last quarter just onboarded additional business units at one of our biggest customers because they saw what we’re doing around articulating our vision for the universal CMS that dotCMS has. And they’re very, very thrilled with the direction that we’re going with Universal Visual Editor and also our thinking around how to actually maintain and retain the intactness of these value streams that have been really severed and really threatened over the past five to 10 years.
Larry:
Because I want to stitch together a few things you just talked about was one is that notion of they’re just asking for the sun and the moon and the stars. They want the whole kit and caboodle. And I think so they want a return to that. Everybody wants to have their piece of control or agency within these systems that they’re operating in. But then you also mentioned the rise of omnichannel and the dream of the vision of the future. And I’ve worked on some omnichannel projects and there needs to be a certain level of abstractness in there to really execute on true omnichannel content delivery strategy. Do we run the risk of universalizing this to get it back to the point where you can’t really deliver omnichannel? Or how are you going to thread that needle to have this give everybody their little piece of control and access to the system and still serve those customers at the end who don’t care what channel they’re consuming the content in, they just want to get their advance in their journeys?
Preston:
I think there’s two very interesting issues here, two things that are really in conflict with each other. And when it comes to universal CMS, the whole notion of a Universal Visual Editor is not meant to re-monolith the size or to recouple or rebundle a lot of things. It’s, yes, rebundling when it comes to how we actually think about how personas work together and how stakeholders work together in the CMS, but not rebundling when it comes to architecture. I think headless is here to stay. It’s very clear that decoupling is here to stay. But there needs to be some level of recoupling of functionality and recoupling of use cases to the point where people understand what they’re doing.
Preston:
From the omnichannel perspective, it’s a very interesting issue here because there’s two forces here that are in conflict. The first is that you have a lot of folks that aren’t even ready to think about omnichannel yet. If I talk to a lot of enterprise organizations, a lot of them only in the last five to 10 years, and only because of the COVID pandemic have actually put a lot of investment into their website and their digital properties online. And so a lot of these companies still are grappling with the fact that they need a website to begin with. They’re not even concerned with how the website performs in terms of front end performance or interactivity. They’re not as concerned with omnichannel.
Preston:
But these are concerns that straddle a lot of different enterprises from the standpoint of the most progressive business units that are brands and the most conservative, just as you need to have the ability to incrementally adopt a headless architecture. And this is one of the reasons why Universal Visual Editor has gained such steam and why one of our biggest customers is so excited about it, is that it allows them to maintain websites that are both traditional, still that static website, still that old, old site that people, no one loved from the ’90s and from the early 2000s, but also all of the future things they might want to do, including in the omnichannel.
Preston:
So this is in the future, they’re going to probably use React or Next.js. They already have plans to do so to migrate over to, but they need to have a single editorial interface that governs both while they’re in that transition incrementally. At the same time, they are looking ahead longer term at some of these omnichannel front ends. These are things like WebXR’s AR/VR or conversational interfaces, voice bots, chatbots, could be digital signage, it could be in-store displays, could be over the top applications like Roku. But the key here is yes, they want to move towards this omnichannel, but they want to have a single editorial interface that rules them all so they can see their content within all of those different contexts and preview them without having to leave the interface and go somewhere different.
Preston:
Now, there’s two challenges here, right? Number one of course is that the channels are very different from each other. Everything that we think about in the omnichannel is now rooted in this notion that everything should be web-renderable. Some things still aren’t, but there’s a lot of interesting innovation happening just like in Universal JavaScript way back in the day when that happened with the client side and server side of JavaScript. There’s a lot happening that’s very interesting from the standpoint of web assembly, for example, execution in the browser that’s different from JavaScript. There’s a lot of interesting work around WebXR, which is for AR/VR applications rendered into the web, technologies like Babylon.js which I’ve written about in Smashing Magazine, technologies as well that are a little bit more, let’s say, cross-platform. So like React Native or Flutter, which basically allowed to create a compile to native flow pipeline for your mobile application.
Preston:
So a lot of these things are now things that you can feasibly render within a web preview. You can now render within a CMS UI a CMS interface. You can render not just a web app in JavaScript, not just a static website, but also potentially a chatbot that’s visual, potentially a voice bot that’s rendered visually, potentially a WebXR AR/VR overlay, things of that nature. And so that’s number one. But number two is you see that a lot of the consternation that comes from folks who are going in this direction with omnichannel is that they still need for their content teams to really understand only one mental model. And that’s the reason why the Universal Visual Editor has gained such steam as an idea, is that it’s the single bus, the single hub that allows for everyone to be able to preview, approve, deny, review, audit for compliance content that’s destined for a variety of channels.
Preston:
Because let’s face it, at the end of the day, no content editor, no compliance officer especially who’s simply reviewing a set of digital experiences for HIPAA compliance or GDPR compliance, for instance, they should not have to care or worry about the fact that two very different technologies are being used to render the exact same website potentially across multiple URLs, or that the same exact technology cannot be used to render content for an AR/VR overlay in WebXR versus let’s say a voice spot that’s rendered in a different framework or so on so forth. For all intents and purposes, if we want to be truly omnichannel, the omnichannel CMS has to be universal enough that any content team can go in, look at all of their content, look at all of their context for their content within each of those environments, and be able to switch between them and cross compare without actually facing 15 different UIs or 15 different gobbledygook URLs.
Preston:
Now, there is of course a level of orchestration needed here. There is of course, a level of traction needed here, and I think that’s one of the big reasons why we’re having a universal CMS summit is to look at, okay, what are the common areas here? What are the things that make sense across all CMSs, but also what are some of the things that everyone is doing and some of the really nifty and innovative approaches to this problem that we’re seeing in the market?
Larry:
And speaking of that, you just mentioned the notion of orchestration. I’m all of a sudden thinking of tools like Conscia and the stuff that Uniform does. Are we getting towards that kind of… Because that’s more about, Sana would disagree, but there’s both the technical integration across all these diverse, like you just mentioned, there’s all these different front ends where things can be and the need for content editors who own the ideas that are being expressed via those various channels to be able to work with them in a single universal place. So that makes sense, but I’m just wondering how does the universal CMS align with this emerging notion of content orchestration that’s out there in the world?
Preston:
Yeah, it’s very interesting. Sana and I have been following each other for quite some time and Conscia’s work is really interesting. I worked on this problem quite a bit when I worked on digital experience orchestration at Oracle Content Management, and to me, I think so the problem with the word orchestration, it’s a great word but I think composable, it’s lost a bit of its meaning and a bit of its heft, because a lot of folks have bought into orchestration thinking that it resolves a lot of these problems around consistency in the user experience or a single mental model to govern them all. And no offense to any of these people who are in the composable orchestration segment of the market, but a lot of what they’re doing is really around integration and federation of data, integration of technology and federation of data.
Preston:
What we’re seeing though is that a lot of people are not happy in the CMS market, especially customers with the notion of integrating very disparate and discreet technologies that oftentimes have very little surface area that can overlap with each other. And it makes for a very fragmented user experience. If you’re managing a single website and you’ve got a commerce component, a content component, a form component, a search component, and now you have to go to four different vendors, Algolia, Typeform, Consea in addition to the CMS and commerce tool that you’re using, that’s a lot of money that you’re and a lot of contracts to juggle. That’s a lot of procurement challenges there, a lot of friction when it comes to all those vendors you have to think about and all those integrations that might now be single points of failure.
Preston:
On the actual other side though, when it comes to the federation or making data easier to use from a content standpoint and making that data more serviceable and also serviceable and deliverable, it is very, very compelling. I think what I struggle with is really, once again, not the developer experience, not the APIs, not how the data fits together, but I’m really, really concerned about the enterprise marketing user or content user experience where they really shouldn’t have to care about a lot of these different things. They don’t really understand JSON. They don’t know GraphQL. They don’t know how APIs work.
Preston:
And so when you look at some of these very abstract tools that go above and remind me of some older integration or marketing automation tools or some of the earlier generation of tools that have come and emerged, I do think that orchestration has a place and Sana, Remeke, and I do agree. We had an exchange actually recently in terms of content where we actually agree on the fact that orchestration is necessary, composable is necessary, but that cannot be at the expense of a very clear user experience and a very clear collaborative approach that prevents 15 different URLs, 15 different vendors, 15 different integrations, and also now an implementation that developers have to manage regardless, because you’ve got this very complex architecture and complicated needs from not just your infrastructure, but also all of your different vendors that you’re managing. You’re talking about five to 10 different clouds. You’re talking about even if you’re using all these SaaS tools, chances are they might be doing stuff in a bunch of different cloud platforms.
Preston:
And that also leads to, I think, a lot of this challenge that a lot of enterprises face. If you look at going back to this enterprise organization that I spoke of in Japan, that’s the last thing they want. They don’t want 15 different UIs. They want to be able to have one single UI to manage their traditional website, their headless website, all their omnichannel front ends, everything that you can imagine. But they need to have that single UI because they can’t afford to slow down and decelerate their editorial needs and prerogatives by having them learn new mental models, learn new UIs. And vice versa, they cannot have their developers slow down to support integrations or internal tools because developers have to be focused on rolling out the best digital experience possible for the end user when it comes to React or Angular or VJS or omnichannel future things.
Preston:
So I do think orchestration has a place, I think Consea, I know Uniform was playing in the space for a while as well. All very important use cases, all very good use cases, but I think that universal CMS gets at a very different problem space that says, “Well, hey, we’ve got all this content. We’ve got all these channels. Now, how do we give that clear 360 view over all of this in a way that actually makes sense not just to developers and architects, but also to the content teams and also compliance officers, for instance, who might really only be stepping into the CMS for a day out of a year, don’t have the time to learn or read a schematic of how all these different integrations flow to each other or how these different products interact with each other?”
Larry:
As you’re saying that, we need to talk to our friend Lou Rosenfeld about getting a content track in his enterprise UX conferences and stuff. But hey, I can’t believe it, Preston. We’re coming up close to time. These always go really fast, but is there anything quick you want to share before we wrap up?
Preston:
Sure.
Larry:
Anything you want to revisit, or…
Preston:
Absolutely. Well, one quick thing I want to mention is that the universal CMS is something that’s gained a lot of steam, of course, and we’re seeing a lot of interest from a lot of different folks. I do want to invite everybody here who is watching our dear friend Larry to come and join us at the Universal CMS Summit. Larry’s going to be there too. It’s on August 5th in Montreal. That’s a Monday. It’s going to be a half day event full of great keynotes and talks. And you’ll see Larry there, you’ll see me there. We got companies who are going to be joining us from all over the CMS market. We got Hygraph joining, Crownpeak. We got Optimizely, Magnolia, TYPO3, all these amazing folks who are coming and joining us. Kentico as well will be joining us too, to really talk about what the universal CMS means and why it’s become such a compelling thing for so many folks, both across the vendor landscape and also across the customer landscape.
Preston:
If you want to find out more, you can go to universalcms.io or universalcmssummit.com. You can also find out more about my writing around universal CMS and myself at my website, preston.so. You can get in touch with me at preston.so@cms.com, reach out to me on LinkedIn, can also use my contact form, but the fastest way is probably LinkedIn or email. And yeah, come and join us at the Universal CMS Summit, and happy to hear your thoughts and would love to talk about universal CMS with you as well.
Larry:
Cool. Thanks so much, Preston. Always fun to talk with you.
Preston:
Always a pleasure. Thanks, Larry.
Leave a Reply