The technology industry is a lot like high school. It’s full of cliques and it’s highly susceptible to trends. When a new tool catches people’s attention, it gets to hang out with the popular crowd and bask in the newfound glory, though eventually the buzz dies down and another hot technology comes along.

But for now, Web content management (CM) is that cool tool. The attraction is obvious: IT managers would love a simple way to control the thousands of pages on their websites. Unfortunately, finding tools that claim to handle content management is far easier than getting a clear definition of what CM should actually do. Every vendor with a search engine or a database claims to offer content management, though many are really knowledge management or document management tools hidden under a new name (see "Management by Any Other Name?" this page). If you’re trying to find an honest to goodness content management tool, sorting through the options can be very confusing.

Ideally, Web content management should be the process of tracking and managing a document end-to-end, from creation to copyediting to Web posting and, finally, to the archive. Better tools also provide more than just tracking; they offer collaborative authoring so that a group can work on a document in an efficient manner that avoids hazards such as the game of "who’s got the latest version?"

However, few content management vendors define their products so clearly, leading to further confusion, says Connie Moore, a vice president with the Giga Information Group in Washington, D.C. "The term content management is ambiguous, and a lot of vendors have latched on to it."

Confusion aside, there’s no denying that content management is huge. The CM market will grow from $3.5 billion in 2001 to $7 billion by 2006, says Ovum, a U.K.-based consultancy. That growth potential attracted hoards of potential players, but now the industry faces a shakeout. When the economy changed from bull to bear, the bevy of small vendors offering content management tools decreased. And while market giants such as Broadvision, Documentum, Interwoven and Vignette remain, others do not. CM vendor eBusiness Technologies, for instance, has failed. Still others succumbed to consolidation. Within a two-month period this fall, for example, enterprise software maker Divine purchased ePrise and OpenMarket, two content management vendors that were suffering from financial difficulties.

And while the startups floundered and merged, the larger infrastructure vendors such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft began to enter the market. In May, Microsoft acquired Ncompass Solutions, another small CM provider, and released the developer version of the Microsoft Content Management Server in August. IBM has the Content Manager portfolio, which is bolstered by partnerships with Interwoven and the former OpenMarket. And in July, Oracle unveiled its Collaborative Content Management Service, which ties in to the company’s 9i database and application server.